The authors created a photo and essay series entitled “Corona Look of the Day.” Each day we took photos of outfits paired with colorful makeup and inspired text descriptions about the beauty in disability. These posts were formulated as resistance to the eugenic discourse pervading the early days of the pandemic that argued disabled and elderly deaths were acceptable and probable. In contrast to this bleak assessment, this artistic series sought to affirm disability through uplifting portraiture.
Keyword: photography
Review of Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam by Thy Phu (Duke University Press)
Thy Phu’s Warring Visions: Photography and Vietnam draws on archives of the Vietnam War that center Vietnamese perspectives to complicate the historical and contemporary visual representation of Vietnamese identities that have been filtered through the Western narrative of the Vietnam War. Her book emphasizes the significance of typically denigrated visual materials including propaganda and vernacular photographs. She focuses on the complex deployment and reception of photographic objects as politicized symbols, sources of memorialization, and identity formation.
Circuits to the Past
This series of photographs tracks digital signals across nine nodes of our fiber-optic undersea cable network – a system responsible for carrying 99% of all transoceanic internet traffic. The images document cable landings in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Tahiti, sites where submarine systems come aground and become entangled in the existing movements of both humans and nonhumans. Rather than locating us in an urban landscape, “Signal Tracks” hones in on the cable system’s rural and aquatic environments, extending from breaking waves over Sydney’s beaches, to mountains where brush fires scour O‘ahu’s west shore, to the habitats of endangered mountain beavers in northern California. Although on the surface these images appear absent of industrial infrastructure, the accompanying textual annotations highlight how such “natural” ecologies have been folded into contemporary digital systems.