Photography and Migration

Tanya Sheehan, Tanya Sheehan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351997904
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Written in the context of unprecedented dislocation and a global refugee crisis, this edited volume thinks through photography's long and complex relationship to human migration.

While contemporary media images largely frame migration in terms of trauma, victimhood, and pity, so much more can be said of photography's role in the movement of people around the world. Cameras can document, enable, or control human movement across geographical, cultural, and political divides. Their operators put faces on forced and voluntary migrations, making visible hardships and suffering as well as opportunity and optimism. Photographers include migrating subjects who take pictures for their own consumption, not for international recognition. And photographs themselves migrate with their makers, subjects, and viewers, as the very concept of photography takes on new functions and meanings.

Photography and Migration places into conversation media images and other photographs that the contributors have witnessed, collected, or created through their diverse national, regional, and local contexts. Developed across thirteen chapters, this conversation encompasses images, histories, and testimonies offering analysis of new perspectives on photography and migration today.

1
Photography and Migration

Keywords

Tanya Sheehan

To consume mainstream media today is to experience one facet of photography’s relationship to human migration. Daily Western news outlets publish photographs of overcrowded boats and trains; life preservers and backpacks, with or without their human users; fences, tents, and other forms of containment or restriction; outstretched feet and hands; young children in the arms of parents or strangers; anguished, angry, vacant faces; and countless bodies arranged in lines, standing still or moving forward. Employing a consistent visual rhetoric, these images can fuse together in viewers’ minds, although occasionally individual photos demand our specific attention and worldwide reproduction. An example of the latter, figure 1.1 depicts a Turkish police officer discovering two-year-old Alan Kurdi after he drowned fleeing Syria with his family.¹ That half of the chapters in this book make reference to the picture – one of many photos taken in September 2015 on a beach near the Turkish resort of Bodrum – attests to its prominence in the international press and scholarship alike.

Motivating this collection of essays is the idea that most photographs disseminated by the mainstream media offer a highly circumscribed view of photography’s long and complex relationship to human migration. Beyond their shared interest in the suffering of children, media images routinely frame migration in terms of forced displacement, trauma, victimhood, and the empathy these conditions can arouse in Western viewers. Yet so much more can be pictured and said of the medium’s role in the movement of peoples within and across borders.² Cameras, after all, can document, enable, or control human movement across geographical, cultural, and political divides. Their operators put faces on migration to a new nation (immigration), migration from one’s own nation (emigration), and a variety of local and regional migrations, any of which might be voluntary or forced. In so doing, they help make visible the motivations for and effects of such actions, ranging from hardship and suffering to opportunity and optimism. Photographers include, moreover, migrating subjects who take pictures for their own consumption, not for international recognition. And photographs themselves migrate with their makers, subjects, and viewers, as the very concept of photography takes on new functions and meanings.³

Figure 1.1 Nilufer Demir/Reuters, Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi found dead on a beach in Bodrum, Turkey, September 2, 2015.

Reproduced with permission from Getty Images.

This volume explores what it means to adopt such an expansive view of photography and migration in the twenty-first century. It does so by placing into conversation media images of contemporary global migration and other photographs that the contributors have witnessed, collected, or created through their diverse national, regional, local, and sometimes personal contexts. Developed within individual chapters and across the book, this conversation encompasses images, histories, and testimonies whose analysis offers new perspectives on photography and migration today.

Conviction that new perspectives are sorely needed has been motivating the organization of conferences and workshops on the subject around the world, including a 2015 international conference at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, where four of the book’s contributors shared their research.⁴ I organized this event through Colby’s Photography and Migration Project, which has brought together scholars, artists, students, and members of the central Maine community since 2014.⁵ The aims of the Project have been to stimulate public discussions about regional migration and link them to current debates about immigration to the United States and unprecedented global migration. Framing the creation of this book, then, were Colby courses, exhibitions of photographs, and community photo-sharing events that explored migration to the Waterville area – once chiefly from French-speaking Canada, parts of Europe, and Lebanon, and now increasingly from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. At the same time – on the very day, in fact, that I began drafting this chapter – US president Donald J. Trump released his second executive order banning travel for refugees and for immigrants from Muslim-majority countries that many new Mainers claim as their homeland.⁶ The order incited protests across the state and around the world in the months that followed and led several US federal court judges to issue orders of their own temporarily blocking the travel ban.⁷ The contributors to Photography and Migration responded to these actions and related events as they unfolded, contemplating their photographic documentation and critique.

Beginning with this introduction, the book makes a case for thinking about photography through four keywords derived from migration studies: (im)mobility, border, refugee, and diaspora. In contemporary parlance, we talk about keywords as concepts of great significance within a discourse, and as words that delimit or refine a search for information. Yet keywords are also capacious, flexible terms that point outward to worlds of knowledge. In organizing Photography and Migration around such concepts, I was inspired by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler’s Keywords for American Cultural Studies, now in its second edition, which offers sixty-four lenses through which to navigate American studies and cultural studies – migration and immigration among them.⁸ Their project responds to the work of British cultural theorist Raymond Williams, principally his influential Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, first published in 1976 with 134 essays. Despite its preoccupation with labor and economics, migration and its close cognates did not make Williams’s list, even after it expanded to 151 essays in 1983.⁹ That omission points to the tremendous weight that scholarship has shifted onto the word, especially in the last decade.¹⁰ In their own response to Williams’s model, the editors of the collaborative writing project “New Keywords: Migration and Borders” confirm that the “discursive currency of these terms” and their current indispensability to cultural studies are “the product of a rather short (global) history.”¹¹

More immediately, the book’s keywords approach is indebted to art historian Anthony W. Lee, whose lecture at the Colby conference in 2015 was framed by six concepts: iconic, labor, accommodation, acculturation, elision, and home. Lee deftly threaded these keywords through the Pictorialism of American photographer F. Holland Day, whose sitters at the turn of the twentieth century were principally immigrants living in Boston’s poor neighborhoods.¹² That my choice of keywords departs from Lee’s should tell readers that a multitude of ideas can structure studies of photography and migration. Indeed, generative conversations have emerged around photography and assimilation, circulation, citizenship, family, home, indigeneity, itinerancy, naturalization, nomadism, settlement, and more. Each of these keywords – like the four that organize this book – are intertwined with others. A refugee, for instance, might cross a border, experience states of (im)mobility, and identify with a diaspora. Readers are encouraged to look for such connections across the different sections of Photography and Migration, while noting that chapters belong to a section because they intentionally explore the contours of a given keyword in current writing on photography.

(Im)mobility

Mobility refers to the ability and freedom – some argue the essential human right – to move freely from one place to another. Anthropologist Bartholomew Dean has extended this definition to include the “right to stay put, to leave, and to return.”¹³ Migration in the twenty-first century is reminding the world that not every subject can exercise freedom of mobility due to national identity, religion, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, or political persuasions. The reality is that certain citizens of a country enter and live within it with minimal restriction, while the movements of non-citizens and others are impeded or halted altogether.¹⁴ In my home country of the US, cameras have helped raise public awareness of the restrictions on mobility in the wake of the 2017 executive orders, as refugees, asylum seekers, and even people with proof of permanent residency in the US (e.g., Green Card holders) have been stopped at the American border and refused entry. Others already on American soil have become immobile, fearing that travel could lead to their exclusion from the US. Circulating widely in the press are photos of people crying and hugging loved ones at international airports and of protesters filling airport arrival halls, decrying the immobilization of predominantly Muslim travelers.¹⁵

Photography’s capacities to fix a moving subject in space and time and to disseminate images and ideas have, for over a century, made it a powerful tool through which to reflect on human migration and (im)mobility. We can locate such reflections in now iconic photographs of historical immigration, among them Lewis Wickes Hine’s portraits of new arrivals at the Ellis Island Immigration Station in New York, taken in 1904–9 and 1926. Consider Hine’s Climbing Into America (figure 1.2), which depicts a group of men and women on a set of stairs, waving sheets of paper in their hands. They were among over 12 million European immigrants who entered the US through its busiest inspection station between 1892 and 1954. The active verb in the photograph’s title, likely applied by the social-reform magazine Survey, suggests an image full of movement and captures the narrative of opportunity that has enshrined Ellis Island in the American cultural imagination. But Hine saw the immigrants as standing still, describing them in a 1930s caption as “waiting to get through the entrance gate” and weighed down by their “personal belongings.” Several figures lock the viewer in their gaze, fixed (and fixing us) in place.¹⁶ Looking across Hine’s Ellis Island series, we find other immigrants stuck in waiting rooms and unmoving lines. Many appear in closely cropped portraits or penned in by solid walls or chain links, their migrations marked by uncertainty, bureaucracy, and frequent setbacks.

Figure 1.2 Lewis W. Hine, Climbing Into America, Ellis Island, 1908, probably printed in 1930, gelatin silver print, 13 1/4 × 10 13/16 in.

Courtesy Yale University Art Gallery.

The uncertainties facing migrants today can help us see in Hine’s photographs a complex view of the immigrant experience, just as such images pave the way for contemporary artists like Emily Jacir to make powerful statements on the politics of (im)mobility. Jacir has a family home on the West Bank of Palestine and has lived throughout the Middle East, Europe, and the US. To create her 2002–3 multimedia project, Where We Come From, she first asked a group of Palestinians living around the world, “If I could do anything for you, anywhere in Palestine, what would it be?” Unlike Jacir, who was allowed to move freely between and beyond Palestinian and Israeli territory, the people to whom she dire...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of maps
• List of illustrations
• About the contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Photography and migration: keywords
• PART I (Im)mobility
• PART II Border
• PART III Refugee
• PART IV Diaspora
• Index