PHOTOESSAY: Refugee migration: Turning the lens on middle Australia (original) (raw)
Related papers
Reproducing Refugees: Photographìa of a Crisis
2020
Since 2015, the "refugee crisis" is possibly the most photographed humanitarian crisis in history. Photographs taken, for instance, in Lesvos, Greece, and Bodrum, Turkey, were instrumental in generating waves of public support for, and populist opposition to “welcoming refugees” in Europe. But photographs do not circulate in a vacuum; this book explores the visual economy of the ‘refugee crisis,’ showing how the reproduction of images is structured by, and secures hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and ‘race,’ essential to the functioning of bordered nation-states. Taking photography not only as the object of research, but innovating the method of photographìa— the material trace of writing/grafì with light/phos—this book urges us to view images and their reproduction critically. Part theoretical text, part visual essay, "Reproducing Refugees" vividly shows how institutional violence underpins both the spectacularity and the banality of ‘crisis.’ This book goes about synthesising visual studies with queer, feminist, postcolonial, post-structuralist, and post-Marxist theories: "Reproducing Refugees: Photographìa of a Crisis" offers theoretical frameworks and methodological tools to critically analyse representations, both those circulated through hegemonic institutions, and those generated from ‘below’. It carves a space between logos and praxis , ways of knowing and ways of doing, by offering a new visual language that problematises reified categories such as that of the ‘refugee’ and makes possible disruptive, alternative, resistant perceptions. The book contributes to the fields of migration and border studies, critically engaging visual narratives drawn from migration movements to question dominant categories and frameworks, from a decolonial, no-borders, queer feminist perspective. **Reviews** "This timely book offers a vivid critical account of the ethics and politics underpinning the visual economy of what has been notoriously called “Europe’s refugee crisis”. From the standpoint of the borders of postcolonial Mediterranean, it opens compelling terrains of critical engagement with epistemologies and lived experiences of “crisis”, tracing how the photographic can become an apparatus of biopoliticized reproduction, visual objectification and epistemic violence, but also, occasionally, comes to articulate transformative solidarity and utopian imaginaries. Reproducing Refugees: Photographìa of a Crisis provides an engaging meditation on how fraught registers of precarity, displacement, belonging, and national citizenship are embedded in racialized, gendered, and sexualized fields of vision and knowledge production. In thinking of “crisis” as a frame through which subjects and the political are (re)produced and made (in)visible, the book mobilizes queer feminist, antiracist, and decolonial perspectives to test the limits of bringing crisis and reproduction together. In so doing, it offers a valuable lens through which to imagine the possibility of change, whereby photographìa might be repurposed to unsettle normative figurations of the present." — Athena Athanasiou, Professor of Social Anthropology, Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences "In Reproducing Refugees, Anna Carastathis and Myrto Tsilimpounidi make a compelling case for the central and indispensable role of photography in mediating the spectacle of Europe’s “refugee crisis.” This book offers a vital critique of the visual economy of objectification by which human subjects crossing state borders are turned into the racialized and gendered objects of other people’s pity or protection, or alternately, of their fear and loathing. Meanwhile, the visual discourse of photography propagates an illusion of transparency even as it remains both equivocal and incomplete – lending its imagery to diametrically opposed interpretations, while also framing events and predicaments in ways that conceal far more than they reveal. And by framing “crisis,” the authors show that photography’s visual economy is indeed an economy of power that inculcates ignorance and cultivates consent and complicity with the border regime’s violence." — Nicholas de Genova, Professor and Chair of Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Houston "A significant intervention into the politics of ‘crisis’ and mobilities, this exciting book foregrounds reproduction, temporalities and the visual. It demonstrates the intensively productive nature of a metaphorical and literal queer lens on human movement. Challenging containment in nations and families in favour of making new connections it offers a guide to thought and action. Read it!" — Bridget Anderson, Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol and Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship, University of Bristol "Engaging with the photographic representation of the summer of migration of 2015 through the angle of social reproduction theory, Anna Carastathis and Myrto Tsilimpounidi's book offers an excellent decolonial queer-feminist analysis of the contemporary conjuncture of crisis in the modern-colonial world system." — Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, Professor of Sociology, University of Giessen "Reproducing Refugees" published in the Challenging Migration Studies series, edited by Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley.
The refugee crisis as shown in photojournalism
Since time immemorial people tend to regard those who differ in some way as hostile elements who came to rape and pillage. The ‘we vs. them’ opposition has always been present in all societies and imagery has been used for propaganda purposes ever since the graffiti on the walls of Pompeii. The human brain is fine-tuned to understand the world in images. Hence, soon after its discovery photography has been used not only to tell stories but to manipulate the masses. Unlike text, which is not so intuitive to understand and requires some skills to be interpreted, photography is relatively easy to understand. One only needs to see the image and that would immediately lead to some assumptions being made. All that combined with the proper interpretation can easily tip the scales in favour of anything the manipulator wants others to believe. Within this short paper I intend to examine a problem that has become ever more important in recent years – the refugee crisis as seen through the lens of photojournalism, namely how the scales were tipped one way or the other with the help of images. One of the ‘game-changing images’ was the UKIP anti-migrant poster used by Nigel Farage to rally voters for the ‘vote out’ campaign during the referendum for the EU in the UK. The other two are images of two Syrian children – the image of the drowned Alan Kurdi and of the air bombing survival Omran Daqneesh . In this paper I do not intend to comment on political decisions but to discuss how two photographs can become a symbol and be used to serve as a weapon of propaganda.
Photojournalism as political encounter: western news photography in the 2015 migration ‘crisis’
Visual Communication, 2019
In this article, we approach the news photojournalism of the 2015 European migration 'crisis' i as a political encounter between western publics and arriving migrants, where the latter are not simply 'the represented' but people who act within the photographic space. Inspired by Azoulay's view of photography as 'civic duty', where "those represented continue to be present there at the time they are being watched in the photograph" and, in so doing, actively call for a response from their publics (2010:16), we ask the question of who acts and how as well as what bonds of civic duty such action puts forward for those publics. At the heart of these questions on agency lies a conception of arriving migrants as specifically vulnerable actors-people whose very precarity becomes a resource for meaningful action. Our visual analysis of news images across nine western countries, 84 images in total, in June-November 2015 demonstrates that their 'front-page' news imagery enables two types of political encounters with arriving migrants: 'action on migrants', where migrants are mainly acted upon within the procedural encounters of border institutions, and 'action by migrants', where migrants act upon and affect others within existential encounters that can potentially touch upon people's emotional and activist sensibilities. While, in line with the canons of photography and migration studies, both types of political encounters restrict precarious agency within the binary positions of victimhood and threat, it is the latter, 'action by migrants' that has the potential to break with such binaries and cast vulnerability as resistance-as deliberate exposures of the body to the power of the border, which present migrants as political actors in activist practices of transnational solidarity (Butler, Gambetti and Sabsay, 2016).
Third Text
This article reconsiders the politics and aesthetics of aftermath photography. Many critics have argued that the emerging, experimental genre of documentary photography ‘abstracts’ and renders ‘sublime’ the traumatic historical events that it takes as its subject matter. While these terms accurately reflect the aesthetics of aftermath photography, their politics cannot, the author argues, be so easily dismissed. The article reconsider the genre through Gene Ray's theories of the sublime and Rosemary Laing's photograph welcome to Australia (2004), which documents the Woomera refugee detention centre, in order to offer a better understanding of what is at stake in this new mode of documentary photography. Third Text, 28.6 (December, 2014), 555-562 Free download for those without access to Third Text: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/65x3pFdkmTNRu4ZkQbj9/full Or http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09528822.2014.970775#.VbMVRjWzq-0
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Beyond Polaroid: Visual Rhetoric in Shaping Refugee's Identity
IJELLH, 2021
Photographs tend to have an ability to influence the collective consciousness of humanity. Sonja K. Foss, a rhetorical educator, opines that language is general while images are concrete and specific. Many a time, photographs have become spokespersons of the suffering and needy lot. Throughout its history, photography has created opinions, constructed realities of people and brought human tragedies to the forefront. The refugee crisis is in no way an exception. In fact, the conscience of the whole world in regard to the refugees was awakened by an appalling photograph of a three-year-old Syrian toddler, Aylan Kurdi, lying face-down into the sand. Such photographs, often symbolic and termed as visual rhetoric, slowly turned into stereotypes defining the refugee crisis. This paper discusses on how these visual narratives have shaped the identity of refugees and created various regimes of seeing.
Refugees, Visual Culture and Theatre: Reinscriptions and Contestations
Performance, Resistance, Refugees , 2023
We have all grown accustomed to familiar representations of the international and its conflicts. Wars, famines and diplomatic summits are shown to us in their usual guise: as short-lived media events that blend information and entertainment. The numbing regularity with which these images and sound-bites are communicated soon erases their highly arbitrary nature. We gradually forget that we have become so accustomed to these politically charged and distorting metaphors that we take them for real and begin to 'lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all'. (Bleiker 2001, 509) The representation of refugees is a particularly troubling example of what Roland Bleiker describes above. In an age where visual culture dominates, the image is relied on increasingly for information (Wright 2002, 53). The image is seen to provide access to and knowledge of 'real' world events and issues. In 2002, Terence Wright asserted that images occupy a key place in the primarily visual medium of television and other media and that these images are not neutral. For example, Wright argues that media images of refugees are part of a universalising lineage of visual culture which has its 'origins in Christian iconography' (53). This means that refugees are cast visually, for example, in an Adam and Eve 'rags and ruin' 'state of degradation' or, in flight like Mary and Joseph's 'Flight from Egypt' with 'few possessions' and sometimes 'a means of transport' or, in the feminised image of Madonna and Child (53-57). According to Wright, instead of photographing 'what is there', camera operators will choose to shoot images that conform to their preconceptions, or if they stray from the usual, those further along the editorial chain will make choices in selecting footage that is 'predictable' (53, 57). In the twenty-first century, this tendency to represent in accord with preconceptions extends arguably to much of Western social media and web-based reportage. Writing from an anthropological perspective, Liisa Malkki identifies the development of a 'standardized way of talking about and handling "refugee problems" among national governments, relief and refugee agencies, and other non-governmental organizations' that emerged in the post-World War II era (1996, 385-86). She argues that media representations then aligned with this standardisation, resulting in 'transnational commonalities in both the textual and visual representation of refugees' that are translated readily and shared across state
This article addresses cosmopolitan cinema through the figure of a former refugee in an Australian- made documentary, Constance on the Edge (Belinda Mason, 2016). Beginning with an overview of cosmopolitanism as a project and a political ideal, as well as its relevance now, I then trace its manifestation in the discourses of refugee advocacy that have been evident in Australia over the last couple of decades. This helps set the stage for a close reading of the film, in which a Sudanese asylum seeker who has been resettled in a regional town with her family is struggling to find a sense of belonging in her new home. I argue that such an instance of cosmopolitan cinema facilitates the audience’s capacity to see both similarities and differences in the refugee other, thereby enabling a politics of solidarity that is simultaneously in dialogue with global and national discourses.
2016
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