Our collective intends to join existing conversations about photography and its political role, but focus on investigating the complex nature of photography’s “democratic” or liberatory power. We believe a historical perspective on the complex relationship between photography and democracy is critical to understanding how the medium and related visual technologies can address the social and political issues of our time.

Since its invention in the nineteenth century, photographs and their circulation have played a role in revolutions, legal shifts, and cultural change. Photographs can make oppression visible and empower the marginalized. At the same time, photography has just as often been used as a tool in colonialism, policing, and exploitation. Ariella Azoulay has written that “photography should be understood as part and parcel of the imperial world.” On the other hand, as Sarah Lewis has pointed out, photography bears a clear relationship to justice, in the sense that “it is increasingly visual culture that shows us worlds unlike our own.”

While both aspects of photography are often studied by scholars, the historical conditions that have made this contradiction possible remain somewhat opaque. Contemporary conversations around photography, no matter which side of this issue they explore, tend to skip over the process by which photography has been repeatedly linked with accessibility and neutrality—the role it has played in confusing seeing with knowing and existing with being seen. These characteristics seem crucial both to photography’s imperial power and its revolutionary potential, to the way it can promise democracy while reinforcing hegemony, and vice versa, the way it furthers global capitalism while also often providing a means of challenging it.

Our chosen title, referencing “By the People, For the People,” is intended as an intellectual provocation. Abraham Lincoln’s wording conjures a US-centric conception of democracy that was in many ways exported globally over the course of the twentieth century. We aim to work both within and against this dominant image to explore the complex histories of photography’s imagined democratic status. This initiative aims to catalyze inquiry that is not historically or geographically restricted, but rather seeks to problematize narratives of pictures and politics centered on Western, capitalist societies from global and contemporary perspectives. How did we arrive at the prevailing constellation of conceptions concerning photography and democracy, and how do we move forward? 

Rather than argue that photography serves either the powerful or the public, we intend to bring together scholarship that breaks down specific ways in which it has often done both. In cases where photography serves progressive values, who else does it also serve? In cases where photography reinforces and implements power structures, what humanistic values are being drawn on to accomplish those goals? 

In other words, what ideas about the nature of visual media have been baked into definitions of modern democracy? What version of the idea of photography has been most successful in disrupting structures like white supremacy or patriarchy, and why? How has photography shaped ideas of democracy and how has democratic citizenship informed understandings of photography? What photographic values have facilitated mass communication in the past, and which values should be prioritized to realize democratic futures?