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Abstract
While working as a janitor at an Arizona-based U.S. Customs and Border Patrol processing facility, Tom Kiefer began photographing the personal belongings of migrants and asylum seekers. These were objects seized and discarded by officials, deemed ‘non-essential’ or ‘potentially lethal,’ and included backpacks, bibles, water bottles, belts, and contraceptives, among other things. Shot in isolation, these seemingly meagre possessions take on lives of their own under the scrutiny of the camera. Displayed as high-resolution colour images, these traces act as embodiments of vulnerable people. Subjecting objects (as opposed to people) to the camera counters the dominant strain of humanitarian photography which focuses on portraiture. Using Kiefer’s photographs as a starting point, this essay explores ways photography can encourage a rethinking of representations of migration and border crossings in the context of large-scale global displacement, rising nationalism, and the prevalence of violent bordering practices. Drawing connections to the work of Andreas Gursky, Taryn Simon, New Objectivity, and stock photography, I mark photography’s link to appropriation and capitalist extraction, and the medium’s unique, often problematic, ability to move between subject and object positions, prompting negotiations between the boundaries of self and other in a world where accumulation is inseparable from dispossession.
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Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. For more on the ways photographic portraits circulated on social media of migrants in crisis frequently reinforce stereotypes and prove ineffective at reforming humanitarian policy, see my op-ed, “Stop and Think Before You Share That Harrowing Picture on SocialMedia,” https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/openforum/article/Stop-and-think-before-you-share-that-harrowing-17120791.php. Note the photograph that accompanies the article, a portrait of an unidentified Ukrainian woman fleeing Mariupol in spring 2022, was not approved by me and indeed its inclusion runs counter to my argument.
2. See Édouard Glissant on the right to opacity in Poetics of Relation; and Fubara-Manuel, “Animating Opacity: Race, Borders, and Biometric Surveillance.”
3. An Amnesty International report details that parents who requested an impartial investigation into the deaths of their children were jailed by the Chinese government. See Justice Denied: Harassment of Sichuan Earthquake Survivors and Activists (Amnesty International Publications Citation2009). https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa17/018/2009/en/.
5. Ibid.
7. Holson, “The Things They Carried;” Baker, “A Janitor Preserves the Seized Belongings of Migrants;” Bengal, “An Exhibition in Tucson Looks at the Things We Leave Behind;” Easter, ‘Border Patrol Threw Away Migrants’ Belongings;” del Barco, “Photographer Documents the Personal Items Confiscated by Border Patrol;” Thompson, “Personal items discarded at U.S.-Mexico Border;” and Epstein, “A Janitor Rescued Migrants.”
8. Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, description of Kiefer’s work, on exhibition October 17, 2019–March 8, 2020. https://www.skirball.org/museum/el-sueno-americano-american-dream-photographs-tom-kieferv.
9. Simon, “Neomaterialism, Part II,” https://www.e-flux.com/journal/23/67825/neo-materialism-part-ii-the-unreadymade/.
10. Ibid.
11. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?” 225–248.
12. Sarah Lewis develops this concept in her writing about Carrie Mae Weems, explaining that the artist’s particular ‘focus from one “vulnerable body,” per Fineman, to the vulnerability of the body politic, brought about by conditions of racial capitalism and slavery, which undergirds the unequal outcomes under SYG [Stand Your Ground] laws today,’ Lewis, “The Arena of Suspension,” 18.
13. Stack, “Let’s Not Pretend We’re Keeping Our Promises on Asylum.” See also Shear and Davis, “Shoot Migrants’ Legs, Build Alligator Moat.”
14. Boetzkes, Plastic Capitalism, 62.
15. Bailey, “’Accumulation by Dispossession’ A Critical Assessment,” https://isreview.org/issue/95/accumulation-dispossession/index.html; See Harvey, “Accumulation by Dispossession,” 137–182.
16. Jenkinson, “Too Much Stuff: Americans and their Storage Units,” https://www.governing.com/context/too-much-stuff-americans-and-their-storage-units.
17. Chubb, “Small Boast, Slave Ship,” 24–43; 30 and 40–41.
18. Agamben, State of Exception.
19. Diack, “Stop and Think Before You Share that Harrowing Picture on Social Media.”
20. Cole, “A Crime Scene at the Border,” 109–115; 115.
21. Cantor, “Still No Action Taken,” https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/still-no-action-taken-complaints-against-border-patrol-agents-continue-go-unanswered.
22. Sullivan and Kanno-Youngs, “Images of Border Patrol’s Treatment of Haitian Migrants Prompt Outrage.”
23. Ibid., Stack.
24. See Greenhouse, “The Supreme Court.”
25. See for example, Patel, We’re Here Because You Were There; and Mehta, An Immigrant’s Manifesto.
26. Troeller, “Against Abstraction,” 108–23.
27. Obrist, Taryn Simon, 1.
28. Obrist, Ibid., 3.
29. Hesse, “What Mothers Know About War.”
30. Noting a stark racial bias in the popular reception and media coverage of Ukrainian refugees led the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association to release a powerful and damning statement regarding the ‘prejudicial responses to political humanitarian crises,’ pointing to a dramatic contrast in the treatment of refugees from Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, for example. https://www.ameja.org/resources/Documents/Ukraine%20Statement.pdf.
31. Linfield, “Should We Be Forced to See Exactly What an AR-15 Does to a 10-Year Old?”
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Notes on contributors
Heather Diack
Heather Diack is Associate Professor of History of Art, Photography and Visual Culture at The Creative School, Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as an independent curator and arts writer. She is the author of Documents of Doubt: The Photographic Conditions of Conceptual Art (2020) which was awarded an inaugural Photography Network Book Prize, co-author of Global Photography: A Critical History (2020), and co-editor of a special issue of the journal photographies entitled “Not Just Pictures: Reassessing Critical Models for 1980s Photography.” Diack is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program and was previously Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Miami (2012-2023) and the Terra Foundation for the Study of American Art Visiting Professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin (2016). Diack’s writing has appeared in journals including The History of Photography, Visual Studies, and Art Bulletin, as well as Artforum, The Miami Rail, and The San Francisco Chronicle. Her current book project interrogates the role of art and visual representation in relation to the humanitarian crisis of forced migration in the context of the twenty-first century.