Photographic Sovereignty

Tuscarora art historian Jolene Rickard introduced the concept of visual sovereignty in 2006, calling for critical engagement with Native art that accounts for the distinct political and legal status of Indigenous nations as sovereign peoples enduring centuries-long colonial occupation. Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie (Diné/Seminole/Muscogee) likewise describes her practice of photographic sovereignty as inverting the camera's colonial power with Native storywork of resistance, resilience, and survival.

These ideas continue to gain significance, with curator Veronica Passalacqua recently describing Native photography as a sovereign space where artists rematriate the medium with visions that sustain Indigenous relations. Diné photographer Will Wilson proposes that such relational use of photography Indigenizes the camera in keeping with Native oral traditions for transmitting knowledge, art, and literature. Meanwhile, scholars such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Glen Coulthard expand discourse on sovereignty by foregrounding practices of refusal and cultural resurgence rooted in Indigenous lifeways.

Thinking with these artists and scholars, this session invites papers that center photographic sovereignty as a culturally specific, land-based, and relationally grounded mode of image-making. We welcome work on how the medium sustains Native bonds to land, kinship, and futurity. We also invite proposals that place photographic sovereignty in dialogue with non-Indigenous visual practices of self-determination—particularly among diasporic or colonized communities with parallel commitments. What concepts—such as photographic refusal, more-than-human lensing, techno-kinship, photographic rematriation, and archival repatriation—help sharpen this discourse? Together, we seek to foreground photographic sovereignty as a vital analytic in photography studies and a critical site of decolonial practice.