Photography Migration And Identity

Between the 1933 Nazi seizure of power and their 1941 prohibition on all Jewish emigration, around 90,000 German Jews moved to the United States. Using the texts and images from a personal archive, this Palgrave Pivot explores how these refugees made sense of that experience. For many German Jews, theirs was not just a story of flight and exile; it was also one chapter in a longer history of global movement, experienced less as an estrangement from Germanness, than a reiteration of the mobility central to it. Private photography allowed these families to position themselves in a context of fluctuating notions of Germaness, and resist the prescribed disentanglement of their Jewish and German identities. In opening a unique window onto refugees’ own sense of self as they moved across different geographical, political, and national environments, this book will appeal to readers interested in Jewish life and migration, visual culture, and the histories of National Socialism and the Holocaust.

Since the mid-nineteenth century photography has played a central role in cultural encounters within and between migrant communities in the United States. Migrant histories have been mediated through the photographic image, and the cultural practices of photography have themselves been transformed as migrant communities mobilise the photographic image to navigate experiences of cultural dislocation and the forging of new identities. Exploring photographic images and the cultural practices of photography as ‘contact zones’ through which cultural exchange and transformation takes place, this volume addresses the role of photography in migrant histories in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century to today. Taking as its focal point photography’s role in shaping migrant experiences of cultural transformation, and how migrant experiences have re-configured culturally differentiated practices of photography, case studies on migration from Europe, Central America, and North America position photography as entwined with cultural histories of migration and cultural transformation in the United States.

Written in the context of unprecedented dislocation and a global refugee crisis, this edited volume thinks through photography’s long and complex relationship to human migration. While contemporary media images largely frame migration in terms of trauma, victimhood, and pity, so much more can be said of photography’s role in the movement of people around the world. Cameras can document, enable, or control human movement across geographical, cultural, and political divides. Their operators put faces on forced and voluntary migrations, making visible hardships and suffering as well as opportunity and optimism. Photographers include migrating subjects who take pictures for their own consumption, not for international recognition. And photographs themselves migrate with their makers, subjects, and viewers, as the very concept of photography takes on new functions and meanings. Photography and Migration places into conversation media images and other photographs that the contributors have witnessed, collected, or created through their diverse national, regional, and local contexts. Developed across thirteen chapters, this conversation encompasses images, histories, and testimonies offering analysis of new perspectives on photography and migration today.

When restrictive immigration laws were introduced in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, they involved new requirements for photographing and documenting immigrants--regulations for visually inspecting race and health. This work is the first to take a comprehensive look at the history of immigration policy in the United States through the prism of visual culture. Including many previously unpublished images, and taking a new look at Lewis Hine's photographs, Anna Pegler-Gordon considers the role and uses of visual documentation at Angel Island for Chinese immigrants, at Ellis Island for European immigrants, and on the U.S.-Mexico border. Including fascinating close visual analysis and detailed histories of immigrants in addition to the perspectives of officials, this richly illustrated book traces how visual regulations became central in the early development of U.S. immigration policy and in the introduction of racial immigration restrictions. In so doing, it provides the historical context for understanding more recent developments in immigration policy and, at the same time, sheds new light on the cultural history of American photography.

In 1948, a small ship carrying Estonian refugees arrived at Pier 21 in Halifax. In this absorbing work, anthropologist Lynda Mannik analyzes the refugee experience through the photographic record of those who made that harrowing voyage. Drawing on a collection of photographs taken during the voyage and at Pier 21, Mannik asks surviving passengers to describe their journey, their reception in Canada, and to what extent the photos reflect their experiences as they remember them. The photographs in the SS Walnut collection, she argues, bear witness to the refugee experience even as the meanings attached to them have changed over time and in shifting contexts.

Cultural Studies -- Film Studies--> In recent decades the experiences and political struggles of immigrants, exiles, and sojourners have inspired some of the most provocative feature films and documentaries in world cinema. These have sparked theoretical debates about cultural identity, place, and representation in the media. The thirteen essays in this anthology contribute to a growing interest in the emerging international genre of exile and diaspora films, treating a variety of motion pictures from Europe and the United States in their national and transnational contexts. These essays examine how contemporary cinema--both fiction feature film and documentary--has imagined the experience of migration and displacement, the struggle for citizenship and cultural belonging, and the encounter and negotiation of different cultures and identities. The authors discuss the ways cinema explores the many contradictions of exile and diaspora--the complicated meanings of home, the exile's nostalgia for origins, the hopes and tragedies of border crossings, the difficulties of belonging to a strange society and being a stranger, and the conundrums of gender for the migrant, especially women's conciliation of different social roles and cultural expectations. Included are discussions of such well known films as The Crying Game, Lamerica, Journey of Hope, Exotica, Chocolat, Lone Star, and Flying Down to Rio, as well as smaller productions by diasporic or immigrant filmmakers who deserve critical attention, including Seyhan Derin's I'm My Mother's Daughter, Mina Shum's Double Happiness, and Yanina Benguigui's Immigrant Memories: Maghrebi Heritage. Encompassing different models of intercultural theory, this collection draws on the fields of anthropology, political economy, production and reception studies, feminism, travel writing, and postcolonial criticism and captures the complex, diverse, and continually changing body of diaspora film and its intertextual connections. Eva Rueschmann is an assistant professor of cultural studies at Hampshire College, the author of Sisters on the Screen: Siblings in Contemporary Cinema, and a contributor to two anthologies, International Women's Writing: New Landscapes of Identities and The Significance of Sibling Relationships in Literature.

This winter, Aperture magazine presents an issue that celebrates the dynamic visions of Latinx photography across the United States. Guest edited by Pilar Tompkins Rivas, chief curator at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, "Latinx" spans a century of image making, connecting historical and contemporary photography, and covering the themes of political resistance, family and community, fashion and culture, and the complexity of identity in American life. In "Latinx," Carribean Fragoza traces Laura Aguilar's influence on queer artmaking. Joiri Minaya remixes postcards from the Dominican Republic to unveil the fantasy of tourism. Christina Catherine Martinez profiles Reynaldo Rivera, who chronicled 1990s-era Los Angeles nightlife. Yxta Maya Murry considers three Latina curators and writers influencing how photography canons are made today. "Collectively, their images cast a greater net for the multiple ways of seeing Latinx people," Tompkins Rivas notes of the issue's photographers, "creating a visual archive whose edges are yet to be defined."