My contribution will focus on the visual composition of a field diary that I wrote during two and half years of research as a clinical anthropologist within a European project for refugees and asylum seekers. The images, conceived as pieces of a mosaic, tell of the encounters, suggestions and evocative power of the stories heard in the clinic. The project, already selected in international photography calls, proposes the objective of composing an artistic narrative of doing ethnography. As Anna Grimshaw (Edwards, 2015) uphold, anthropology (and ethnography) can be seen as a project of visual imagination. In this perspective, photographs can be thought of as a translation of an affect, a matrix of the subjectivity of experience. Thus, the images that composed my field diary are a 'way of seeing', a recording of thought in a synaesthetic manner, as some of the literature on the practices of visual anthropology claims (McDougall, 2006; Marano, 2013). The resulting mosaic presents itself as a possible way of traversing and experiencing 'difficult' terrains such as those of ethnoclinics.
This photographic essay presents a photography workshop held in Ankara, Kale Mahallesi (castle neighbourhood), with a group of Romani and Syrian children aged 6 to 13, as part of an ongoing effort by Birlikte Kent (a collective based in Ankara) to create space for dialogue, exchange, and knowledge production. Guided by critical social theory and Freirean notions of conscientisation, the workshop encouraged children to use photography as a method for reflecting on and narrating their urban environment marked by community, gentrification, and displacement. The workshop, which was organised through a collaboration between two collectives, Birlikte Kent (Ankara) and Fotohane Darkroom (Mardin), positions children as 'knowers', supporting them in documenting their personal and collective stories, claiming ownership of their narratives, and bringing attention to conditions of urban transformation and the rightto the city. This photo-essay presents 15 photographs taken bythree of the participating children.
This article addresses dialogical practice between anthropology and art and how it afforded connection of elements of different scales: seemingly distant and disconnected processes and bodies with the multiple, interdependent ways climate crisis manifests in a small valley in the Mediterranean Alps. It discusses how methods and disciplines the author sought to keep separate ended up coming into dialogue that, while in the field, helped in a situation of overwhelm, when back from the field-contributed to making sense of things and, later, helped return to text.
The stereotyped image of the Maasai is a significant aspect of Tanzania's tourist industry, with photography playing a key role as a form of commercialization as well as a source of income. For some Maasai women themselves, however, selling their image is a complex endeavor implying cultural, economic, and affective challenges. Unlike tourists seeking an authentic experience, Maasai women question where their images go, for what purpose, and to what end. Departing from a collection of colonial photographs brought to the field, this article explores the intricate relationship Maasai women have with their own image, contrasting their perspectives with broader themes of tourism and photography. Photographs are highly affective objects that facilitate relationships of looking and being looked at; at the same time, they can carry memories and are, in the case of tourist photography, highly mobile objects, that circulate globally. While their photographs become a commodity, Maasai individuals are often excluded from the consumption and control of their own images. However, within Maasai households, women often function as the safekeepers of the family's photography; the images in these contexts become carefully guarded objects that the women cherish and care for. The article explores the women's complex relationships with the medium of photography, facilitating a more nuanced understanding of photography and photographic practices in the Maasai context.
This article proposes an analytical framework that complements the well-established anthropological focus on the agency of art objects by shifting attention to their desire. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Comuna 13, Medellin (Colombia), it explores how the desire of local street artists-ratherthan their agency- is distributed through their artworks. Conducted in collaboration with the artistic collective Casa Kolacho, the research involved participation in their graffiti school, interviews with artists, and close analysis of selected murals. The findings suggest that these artworks express a desire to connect past, present, and future: preserving memory, celebrating transformation, and envisioning new possibilities. Byforegrounding desire over agency, the article offers a temporal lens through which to understand how art shapes lived experience and collective imagination in contexts of urban change.
Este estudio examina el consumo cultural en un cine independiente de Barcelona, identificando dos grandes grupos de espectadores con distintas motivaciones, perfiles y patrones de consumo. Durante la investigaci & oacute;n se recopilaron datos de 1.882 participantes a trav & eacute;s de encuestas geolocalizadas, redes de consumidores, seguimiento de redes sociales y grupos focales. El perfil predominante responde a personas mayores de 40 a & ntilde;os que asisten regularmente al cine y se informan a trav & eacute;s de medios tradicionales y redes sociales. A pesar de las importantes diferencias relacionadas con la edad, ambos grupos valoran la excelencia t & eacute;cnica y las experiencias cinematogr & aacute;ficas inmersivas, complement & aacute;ndolas con otras actividades culturales. El estudio revela tambi & eacute;n perfiles demogr & aacute;ficos subrepresentados en otras encuestas de participaci & oacute;n cultural y muestra c & oacute;mo los sectores m & aacute;s j & oacute;venes mantienen un enfoque "omnivoro" hacia el consumo cultural, frente a las tendencias m & aacute;s "univoras" de los segmentos de mayor edad....
The La Salaga Project is a multimedia retelling of a legend from West Sulawesi. The project includes art from Bali, the island on which part of the story takes place; innovative fonts of an Indonesian script; poetry and video. This article uses the La Salaga Project as a lens to explore interculturalism in Indonesia. It describes the milieu in which the project was created and received; the intercultural aspects of the project; and interculturalism in Indonesia more generally. In so doing, it echoes the opinion of the Balinese artist and scholar I Wayan Setem who emphasizes the importance of dialogue to interculturalism.
How can we make the most of smartphone photography, which has become so familiar in our lives, as 'documents of life' that help us understand our lives, rather than just immediate and transient data/media? We organised and held a screening workshop for the ethnographic documentary film Transition, which was made using smartphone photography, and discussed the meaning and potential of smartphone photography with the workshop participants. In this paper, after introducing an overview of the film Transition, we will report on the background of the workshop's planning and design, the implementation process, and the participants' reactions. Finally, we will summarise the findings from this workshop on how to make the most of smartphone photography as key 'documents of life' that help us to understand our lives, ratherthan just immediate and transient data/media.
This text focusses on a fieldwork experience in which we aimed to use illustrations and images to disseminate research outcomes. Inspired by the concept of rhizome in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, we will discuss the method and contradictions of research when it seeks to produce cultural and visual texts/objects which aspire to reach beyond academic circles and engage in co-narration practices. We deal with the ambiguity of our own ethnographic experience presenting a diary of what happens in fieldwork: the Foggia area between the so-called "runway" in Borgo Mezzanone and the "ghetto" in Rignano-two migrant day laborers' settlements, two islands surrounded by endless agricultural fields. We will try to explain the method we used to build what we have called "rhizomatic graphic novel", that is, a piece of work created by researchers from a heterogeneous range of disciplines starting from a shared field experience, which has radically challenged our initial intentions unsettling the relations between "informants" and "researchers".
The paper examines the localization of hip-hop culture in the province of Foggia, with a specific focus on the town of Apricena, through an ethnographic study inspired by the methods of visual anthropology. Originating in the Bronx as a form of cultural resistance, hip-hop is reinterpreted by young people in Apulia as a tool of identity expression and social agency. The investigation draws on participant observation, semistructured interviews, and photography, culminating in the production of a fanzine that visually reflects the fieldwork. The analysis explores artistic practices-rap, dance, graffiti, fashion-with particular attention to the use of dialect as a means of symbolic reappropriation and territorial rootedness. Hip-hop culture emerges as a glocal phenomenon, capable of articulating both innovation and tradition, aesthetic participation and the collective construction of meaning.
The article aims to draw critical reflections on the production, circulation and reception of images in Palestine, given the recent rise of political violence in the context of the Israeli military occupation and settler colonialization of Gaza and the West Bank. Reflections move from the author's personal relations built during fieldwork in the occupied West Bank, and from the exchange of pictures, messages and video calls as a sort of "protracted ethnography". In the context of Israel's control on images and the ban on international journalists to enter Gaza, the first part of the article questions Palestinian images as a mode of testifying to Israeli state violence. By contrast, in the second part, the representation of Palestinian suffering is considered through visual contents produced by Israelis, who made them circulating through social media. Ultimately, the article explores the performative character of images in creating multiple publics who differently relate to the visual grammar of testimony in the globally contested field of Palestinian memory. From this global perspective, "the pain of the gaze" is thought as a necessary although uncomfortable standpoint, from which to grasp traces of presence, life aspirations and the quest for justice.
This article discusses the relationship between subjectivity, technology and aesthetics drawing on the case of Nasim, a youtuber of Iranian origin based in California who attacked employees and died at Google's headquarters in 2018. Nasim's self-produced videos provide an entry point to reflect on the encounters between the making of self and audiovisual technologies under current capitalist conditions. Analyzing the formal features of Nasim's videos and the labor they entail, the article reflects on the mutual imbrication of self-determination (autopoiesis) and techno-social articulations, to sketch the hypothesis that freedom and control far from being opposites are inextricably linked and define the conditions of a current mode of existence in which the expression of life results in death.
This essay explores the visual traces of Eritrean presence in 1970s Rome, focusing on the documentary film A testimonianza di una condizione-2000 eritrei a Roma. The film, produced by Federico Bruno, Giovanni Gervasi, Ali Reza Movahed, Paolo Rossato, and Johannes Yemane, is one of the earliest visual documents portraying an African migrant community in Italy. It highlights the experiences of Eritrean migrants, particularly women, who faced exploitation and marginalization while striving for better futures through education and political activism. The film underscores the importance of the 1970s as a foundational period for African migration to Italy, challenging the common narrative that significant African migration began in the 1990s. It also emphasizes the role of the Eritrean People's Liberation Front (EPLF) in organizing and empowering the Eritrean diaspora in Rome in that period. By examining this film, the essay aims to reframe Italian collective memory and identity, incorporating African perspectives and experiences. This approach not only enriches the understanding of Italy's social and cultural history but also calls for further research into the visual archives of non-European filmmakers who documented their experiences in Italy.
Social media, particularly TikTok, has become a key platform for the "New Italians" (the so-called "second generation"), young people of migrant descent who have achieved national and sometimes international success. They navigate the neoliberal economy, engaging in the "attention economy" and "visibility labor" (Abidin 2020). Despite their diverse video styles, these young people utilize social media to challenge migration stereotypes and critique exclusionary policies and the rhetoric of multiculturalism (Bachis 2023). While their content is rarely explicitly political, it reveals a "memetic dimension" of political expression (Literat and Kligler-Vilenchik 2019) and a "memefication" of intergenerational politics (Zeng and Abidin, 2021). The article focuses on a specific TikTok trend: the "What-people-think-I-do/What-I-really-do" video meme, juxtaposing stereotypical expectations with personal realities. These videos, aimed at relatives in migrants' countries of origin or the "homeland," reflect intergenerational relationships and cultural expectations in Italy. These videos create an irreverent discourse around social norms regarding migration through the use of irony, exaggeration, and the subversion of stereotypes. By crafting inside jokes that bridge generations, the meme reshapes imaginaries about migration and mobility in transnational social spaces.
Unauthorised border crossings are probably the most mediatised of all illegal(ised) human activities. Images of people moving across the Mediterranean on boats or on foot have become iconic of how we have come to understand the social phenomenon of 'illegal migration' in Southern Europe. At the same time people who cross borders create specific relationships to the images that are produced of them by the states involved before, during and after the crossing. Identification photographs for passports and permits of stay become charged with particular "affective frequencies" (Campt 2017) in the context of unauthorised border crossings and legalisation. This paper examines the existential and affective relationship that Mohamed Khamis, a previously undocumented Egyptian migrant establishes with such governmentalised images of himself during the process of legalisation initiated by the 2012 amnesty in Italy. Collaborative filmmaking, animation and performance provide the ethnographic context through which our research has attempted to trace the "resonating frequencies" that are enclosed in the border regime's visual framings. This contribution contests for co-creative image making as an epistemological practice that attunes anthropology to ways of listening to the socio-political and existential possibilities contained in images that both enable and disable futures of mobility into being.
The article presents a collaborative exploration of Mohamed Keita's photographicjuxtapositions. Grounded in the dialogic nature of our encounters, it reflects on the affective power of images to connect people and life-worlds-including the photographer and the anthropologist themselves. Images thus emerge as sites of encounter between situated ways of seeing, taking into account but also transcending a dichotomic approach to borders and power asymmetries between places and viewers. Ratherthan merely representing reality, Mohamed Keita's photographs seem to express the existential condition of the tonkarank & eacute; - a way of living and seeing the world that intertwines displacement, adventure, and a sense of being out of place. The article outlines the collaborative methods that shaped this reflexive engagement with images and experiments with a mode of writing that seeks to convey the affective resonances and preserved autonomy of the selves involved in the collaboration. In the second part of the article, ten photographicjuxtapositions are presented, each accompanied by extended captions and key titles, to foreground the shared visual and affective dimensions they evoke.
Although Italy today is in fact a pluralistic country of multiple cultural views, its political and cultural institutions tend to represent a uniform national identity, reproducing a fixed consensus of what being Italian means. Processes of "othering" reproduce a reified concept of being Italian that excludes both young recent migrants and the children of immigrants. Structural processes of demarcation, exclusion and marginalisation are at play. This article is based on the photographic essays produced in 2021 and 2024 as part of the Sguardi Plurali ("Plural Glimpses") project, a national competition and exhibition for photographers younger than age 35 who emigrated to Italy at a young age or were born in Italy to immigrant parents. After first analysing the rich visual materials and their accompanying text, I reflect on the contestants' widely differing life stories, on the complex connections between migration experiences and the photographic records of it, and on the relationship between generalised representation and self-representation. I explore not only the final submissions, but the creative process itself, reconstructed through the voices of the photographers, as well as how the project came about.
Sundarban is the largest continuous mangrove forest and one of the richest biodiverse regions, which provides many critical ecosystem services from local to global level. Throughout human and non-human interaction in the region, a unique syncretic eco-centric culture has evolved centred around the local forest goddess, the Bon Bibi. This ethnographic article elucidates the emergence of Bon Bibi as the guardian of forests and forest-dwelling communities. Through a series of photographs, the article portrays different traditional livelihood practices, struggles of local forest/river-dwelling communities, belief systems, and rituals that played pivotal roles in adaptive strategies to avoid human-tiger conflict and foster communitybased forest conservation in uncertain times of changing climate. The legends of Bon Bibi further teach several ecological virtues, from coexistence between humans and non-humans to avoiding conspicuous natural resource consumption. The Pantheon belief system played a prominent role in unifying diverse communities to foster resilience and provide moral strength while venturing into challenging mangrove landscapes.
