Photography Then and Now: Surveying the Power of the Still Image to Move, Speak and Yet Live

This paper explores the Hashem el Madani Collection (1953-1982) within the Arab Image Foundation, focusing on exhibitions curated by Akram Zaatari. Drawing from José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of disidentifications, the study examines visual knowledge performance in this epistemological field, exploring agency within photographic practices and photography as a medium. It critiques normative secular-liberal views through Saba Mahmood’s work on agency in the women’s mosque movement. Ulrike E. Auga’s notion of agency photography is discussed as a means to overcome colonial photographic canons. By integrating Muñoz’s, Mahmood’s, and Auga’s frameworks, the paper outlines new modalities of agency, emphasizing the transformative potential of piety in reshaping visual discourses on the 'Middle East'. This interdisciplinary approach offers insights into subject formation, human flourishing, and the politics of representation within both religious and secular-based historical and contemporary discourses on gender and sexuality in Lebanon.

Researchers collecting and classifying photographs of European cultural heritage sites threatened by war during the 19th and 20th centuries understood their work as keeping alive the memories of masterpieces in the path of destruction. Through this work selecting cultural heritage for preservation through photography, teams including the Warburg Institute, the US Monuments Fine Arts and Archives subcommission, and manuscript microfilming projects linked European cultural heritage to medieval Christians’ belongings and buildings. Using archival records from these major photographic preservation projects, I examine how photographic preservation projects facilitated the transformation of devotional objects and religious sites into collectable art.

In contemporary Thailand, lay Buddhists’ surveillance of monks on social media is ubiquitous. Especially sexual surveillance, in the forms of photographs of monks displaying feminine behavior and sexual desire for women, leads Thai Buddhist laity to decry the decline and destruction of their religion. Normative Buddhist monastic masculinity in contemporary Thailand would demonstrate an ability to tame desire for sex and expressions of femininity. Using scholarship on Buddhist masculinity, masculinity studies, and Foucault’s concept of docile bodies, I analyze contemporary surveillance of monastic sexual behavior through the lens of media and photographs. Data from Thai news sources, flashpoints of male heterosexuality and feminine behaviors of monks, and focus group interviews with Thai Buddhist laity, reveal that the distance of media and possibilities of surveillance through photographs narrate the current state of Thai Buddhism and how laity contextualize this recent disciplinary tendency. 

This presentation introduces the concept of "visual silence" as a framework for analyzing East-West landscape cinema, photography, and post-1968 cultural dynamics. It challenges Left-wing melancholia by reframing it as a representation of the loss of homelands, cultural belonging, and viable solidarities. Exploring Asian landscape art traditions tied to Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist philosophies, the study delves into a contemplative "blank space" aesthetic. Focusing on Japan's fûkeiron ("landscape theory") movement, it examines how radical filmmakers and photographers, exemplified by the film A.K.A. Serial Killer, employed visual silence to investigate urban landscapes under state power. Contextualizing fûkeiron's dialogue with French art and thought, the presentation argues that visual silence is a transformative technique rooted in older religious traditions, challenging prevailing cultural norms. It concludes by showcasing contemporary photographers Li Lang and Jungjin Lee, illustrating visual silence's enduring capacity to evoke, challenge, and reimagine narratives of loss, remembrance, place, and transformation.