Photography, Personhood, and Property

Photographic portraits negotiate power relationships. Physical and material, they are also sites through which power flows between the photographic subject, the photographer, and photographic consumers. To this end, scholars have frequently considered photography as a means of objectification and, in turn, domination—investigating the production of photographs of colonial subjects, for example, or critiquing the re-theorization and re-appropriation of images of marginalized individuals within institutional collections. And yet, even as photographic images of human subjects have been objects possessed, owned, and collected they have also been the instigators of resistance and assertion of relations beyond property. As early as the 1860s, Frederick Douglass [1861] and Sojourner Truth [c. 1864] recognized and harnessed the power of photographic self-representation as a mode of self-possession. More recently, scholars like Lily Cho have re-examined and recast institutional archives, insisting on the recuperation of individual personhood within regimes of surveillance and control. We are similarly intrigued by Elizabeth Edwards’s proposition that we shift our attention from the veracity of representation to consider the kinds of “distributed” and extended social relations photographic portraits perform. What does it mean to consider a personhood mediated by and through photography? This panel seeks papers querying these historic forms of ambivalence as well as those addressing contemporary responsibilities attending the production, study, stewardship, and narration of photographic portraits.