Since its popularization in the nineteenth century, photography, and later film, have been deeply entangled with mobility. Some of the earliest experiments with photographic identification were deployed by states seeking to surveil migrants from Asia, Arabia, and Africa. But migrants quickly repurposed photography for their own purposes as they visualized alternative geographies through the medium. Often the same images served multiple purposes—duplicates of a single studio portrait, sometimes the only image of a migrant, were deployed as passport ID, treasured keepsake, and newspaper obituary. Today these images have disparate afterlives in state archives, university libraries, family collections, museums, and increasingly social media. How do we work with such mobile images as scholars, and how do we collect and preserve them as archivists, whether in our personal or institutional collections? How do the new mobilities that photographs take on when they are digitized change how we analyze their meaning, and ethnically navigate their display? This workshop explores these questions by bringing together an interdisciplinary group of scholars and archivists to discuss images from their work that engage with mobility in different forms.

Convened by Julia Stephens (Senior Humanities Research Fellow)

May 12, 2023

In-Person (NYUAD Campus)

The workshop is open to the NYUAD community and by invitation only. Registration has closed.