This session examines the role of photography in shaping state narratives – whether to pursue superpower ambitions, as part of a colonial project, or to create a national identity, post-independence.  

We will analyse the photographic image alongside its modes of dissemination, including magazines, photobooks and films. Case studies include the ‘Nuremberg moment’ after WWII, using images from the International Military Tribunal for the Senior Nazi War Criminals, when the US and USSR vied for global dominance.  We will then pursue British incursions into Kenya and Malaya during the 1950s and 1960s, Guyana’s independence in 1966, before making a temporal shift to the Arab Uprisings of 2011. Artists we will discuss include: Sim Chi Yin, Sarah Waiswa, Max Pinckers, The Mosireen Collective. 

This session explores the relationships between history, myth, nationhood and empire, focusing on how contemporary photographers navigate this terrain. Case studies include: Lina Geoushy, Guy Martin, Larissa Sansour and Diana Matar, who each complicate idealised myths of nationhood, and use their photographic practices to destabilise imperial ideology. A focus on humanism’s role in photography’s histories, popularised by and debated ever since The Family of Man exhibition in 1955 at MOMA, will engender debate about the universal, the singular, and the sticky concept of democracy. 

Texts by W J T Mitchell, Roland Barthes, Alan Sekula 

How has the archive functioned as both a site of silence and violence, and yet can be transformed into a space of resistance? What happens when the continued existence of the archive is threatened? 

Works by Sara Salaam, Ndidi Dike, Susan Meiselas, Naiza Khan, Sunil Shah and Walid Raad, highlight how archives serve both as records of colonial dogma and platforms for anti-colonial sentiment.  

Texts by Kareem Estefan, Tina Campt, Ann Stoler 

This session examines how artists expose hidden truths – including those hidden in plain sight - that disrupt official state narratives and concepts of collective memory. We will discuss Edmund Clark and Crofton Black’s work on the War on Terror, Vera Zurbrügg on Switzerland’s Nazi Gold and Salvatore Vitale’s exploration of Swiss securitisation.  

Texts by Eyal Weizman, Claire Birchall, Michael Rothberg 

What happens when connections between people and land are severed? This session explores displacement and how it is expressed through photography and literature. We analyse After the Last Sky by Edward Said and Jean Mohr, which documents exile in image and text, as does W.G. Sebald’s unclassifiable work The Emigrants. We will also consider the impact of exile on artists like Amak Mahmoodian, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Tarrah Krajnak.  

Texts by Edward Said, W G Sebald, Omar El Akkad 

How are contemporary visual artists using photography to tell what Stuart Hall calls ‘the extremely long story’ about their personal origins and their sense of belonging? We will study the contrapuntal work of diasporic artists such as Khadija Saye, Monica Alcazar Duarte, and Mame-Diarra Niange, whose works are united by a refusal to be reduced to ‘types’. The transdisciplinary aesthetic strategies employed by Jermaine Francis, Rene Matic and by Johny Pitts to navigate the intersection of race and class in the UK will also be explored. Finally, we will look at how artists challenge the institutions that influence and carry our ways of seeing, such as Hew Locke’s retelling of Britain’s imperial histories and the institutional critique and multiple modes of address offered by Abbas Zahedi. 

Texts by Khalid Abdalla, Nadine El Enany, Eduard Glissant