Photography and Citizenship

The course aims to trace the emergence of the concept of citizenship to representational practices in photography, thereby moving beyond the association between borders and physical structures of enclosure. Competencies gained by the students include the ability to historicize and critique the practices associated with the modern state’s construction of national identity and a sense of collective belonging as well as to appreciate the pitfalls and benefits of associating citizenship with visibility.

Ability to read advanced texts in English

While bricks and mortar delimit a physical territory, some nation-state borders are less material. Such is the divide between citizen and non-citizen, a differentiation most often constituted by documents that certify an individual’s belonging to a given state and in whose absence the individual is assessed as alien. In an era of global unrest and mobility, as often as physical residency, citizenship is legitimized through possession of such documents. This course studies the documents designed by the modern nation state to identify its citizenry. It focuses on the modern identity document, invented in the Renaissance and standardized through photographic practices in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Through study of state initiatives to document colonial subjects, imprisoned subjects or the subjects of medicine and psychiatry, the modern idea of the citizen is shown to have developed out of the photography of individuals marked as other, abnormal or alien. At the same time, documentary projects by modern and contemporary photographers will help recognize the potential of photography to establish a relationship between viewer and viewed according to the Enlightenment principles of a social contract.

Knowledge and understanding:

To understand the constructedness of the concept of citizenship and to be able to trace its emergence to several moments in the history of modernity and modernism.
To be able to approach photography as non-representational, that is bearing evidence of operations of state or civic administrations.
To be able to approach photography as non-representational, that is bearing evidence of the material and structural properties of its own medium.
To appreciate photographers who have mobilized the material and structural properties of their medium to negotiate the visibility of identity in the human face.

• Azoulay, Ariella. 2008. The Civil Contract of Photography. Catalogue
• Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. “The Face.” Means Without End. Notes on Politics. E-version
• Sander, August. 2003 [1929]. Face of Our Time : Sixty Portraits of Twentieth-Century Germans.
• Guenther, Hans F. K. 1970 [1927]. The Racial Elements of European History. Translated by G. C. Wheeler. London: Methuen and Company. E-version
• Cho, Lily. 2009. “Citizenship, Diaspora and the Bonds of Affect: The Passport Photograph.” Photography and Culture 2 (3): 275–87. https://doi.org/10.2752/175145109X12532077132310
• Salter, Mark. 2003. Rights of Passage : The Passport in International Relations.
• Torpey, John. 2001. The Invention of the Passport : Surveillance, Citizenship and the State. Catalogue
• Groebner, Valentin. 2007. Who Are You? : Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe. Catalogue
• Cole, Simon A. 2001. Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification.
• Sekula, Allan. 1986. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39 (Winter): 3–64. E-version
• Gunning, Tom. 1995. “Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives and Early Cinema.” In Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. E-version
• Tagg, John. 1993. The Burden of Representation. Essays on Photographies and Histories.
• Butler, Judith. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Edited by Sue-Ellen Case. Theatre Journal 40 (4): 519–31. E-version
• Edwards, Elizabeth. 1990. “The Image as Anthropological Document.” Visual Anthropology 3: 235–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/08949468.1990.9966534
• Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. 2007. “Mechanical Objectivity.” In Objectivity. Catalogue
• Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2003. Invention of Hysteria. Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere. E-version

Type (examination, oral, coursework, project):
Attendance and active participation (25%), two presentations of readings (20%), essay (2000 words) or other creative research project related to biopolitics (40%), annotated photographic collection (15%).

Assoc. Prof. Peter Purg, PhD currently leads the New Media module in the Digital//Media Arts and Practices graduate//postgraduate programme at the School of Arts, University of Nova Gorica, where he acts as Associate Professor, projects coordinator as well as expert across realms of digital culture and media. Since December 2021 he is Dean of the School of Humanities. Having obtained a PhD in media art, communication science and literary studies from the University of Erfurt (Germany), his scientific inquiries now include media arts pedagogy, interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation, media art and media ecology. His artistic interests range from (lecture) performances and intermedia installations to public-space interventions as well as participatory creative processes. He is active in the field of cultural and higher education policymaking and quality assurance.