Subjunctive Glitter

In her book Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography (2015), culture and media scholar Ariella Azoulay examines the event of photography as a porous site of political possibility. While considering the photographic process as both performance and a canvas of textual discourse, she frames it as politically relational, consisting of multiple agents both seen and unseen. For her, photographs can possess qualities of excess and lack of inscription-based evidence. That is, photos are necessarily beholden to all possible trajectories of agentive circulation. For Azoulay this means that the wills of the individual, institution, and all invested creators and observers in between, are inscribed on a photo and that its qualities cannot be reduced to one intended representation (2015, 85-87). Because of this, the political event of photographic creation is open-ended, and the artifact, or image, can thus circulate endlessly when decontextualized from historical constraints. It is the possibility for unheralded civil collaboration between agents in the spaces of the photographic event.
This photo is part of a collaborative curation with my interlocutors, enacted with the knowledge that there are historical problems of representation when anthropologists employ photography in ethnographic research. By removing the objects from contexts that imply one structural conceit or another, my intent is to allow them to perform from spots of affective and material vibrancy. Here, I am drawing from political theorist Jane Bennett, who argues that materials like everyday objects and photographs can be understood to have a "vital force" (2010, 17-21). For her, this vitality resonates with an inhuman form of affect, creating through agentive praxis that which has hitherto been reserved for human description and action. Her work has led to others further examining subject-object ontologies while attempting to dissolve the binaries between nature and culture.
By de-territorializing the inscribed linkages between object and world, the emotional, mobile, and what feminist philosopher Stacy Alaimo has called the "trans-corporeal" nature of material objects, we can point to new contingencies for what those things are and where they might go (Alaimo & Hekman 2008). Alaimo uses trans-corporeality to explain how subjects and objects are permeable at their most fundamental level. As such, their engagements with one another leave traces that persist beyond the event of contact. She contends this arrangement is predicated on a "viscous porosity," where objects are open to, but stick with, other subjects and objects in ways that can be material, ethical, and political (Alaimo 2012, 15-17).
This material vibrancy (Bennett 2010, 15-25) has been key for me to understand how aesthetics and artifices in photography can circulate past the point of exposure. With photographs, the matter is agentive at the level of the photo, the objects in frame, and the manner and methods through which the picture was taken. As such, the many entanglements of the photographic act can create spaces for all interlocutors to consider ways of being, knowing, and feeling beyond the confines of one political reality or isolated ontology.

Commentary on Rachel Tanur's Works: Sculpture Girl Pair

Tanur's photo here illustrates how material objects can become enmeshed with affective narratives by ringing with extra-corporeal intensity. At the same time they are intimate and symbolic. Detached from any visual narrative, this photo can hold as a symbol of static relationality, or maybe the joy of place and moment. There is also merit in attuning to the material object as opposed to the fleshiness and revelation of the person. For anthropologists like myself, the ethics of visual representation are indices of an old but persistent crisis. As illustrated by her critical analyses of the discipline's colonial, complicit, and persistent racializing visual practices, anthropologist Deborah Poole has shown that anthropology has had, and continues to have, an infelicitous relationship with visual technologies and methods (2005, 159-179). Historically situated as a tool of colonial appropriation and exploitation, photography in contemporary ethnographic research has evolved in parallel to the discipline's textual crisis of representation, a turn which has critically called into question the researcher's power in relation to her interlocutors. Moving past this crisis to examine the uses of the image by interlocutors themselves, media anthropologists have highlighted the material worlds of photography as local and global instantiations of resistance and counter-institutional affective narratives embodied in disparate forms, from family archives to identification cards (Lydon 2005; Pinney 1997, 2004, 2008; Strassler 2010). For me, there is real power in collaboration between the researcher and their subject that coalesces in the creative act. In this way, the visual artifact, the photo, is but one part of a broader realm of virtual possibility where the perennial "other" of social science can be emboldened to re-appropriate their agency and narrative. The object, instead of the human body, as the subject in-focus can be a refusal of the identity that documentation has historically engendered. It can also be a refusal of the self as cultivated at the pleasure of the structures, institutions, and disciplinary norms our interlocutors struggle through every day.