INTRODUCTION: BOUNDARIES AND BORDERS

The papers and visual works presented here were developed from the photographies 3^rd international conference, held between 22–24 September 2022, at the University of Texas at San Antonio’s (UTSA) School of Art. Papers selected for the conference were organised into six thematic sessions, taking place over two days, with the title categories of Borders and Boundaries, Transcending Boundaries, Curatorial Perspectives, Borders in Flux, Critical Memory, and Transient Ecologies. These sessions were intended to be performative, to generate discussions between papers and across sessions, and were conceived in the spirit of the very questions we set out to consider: How far and in what ways has photography addressed, help to inform, or undo boundaries and borders.

We imagine that readers are all too aware of the structuring function of borders, which are instrumental in defining states, nation-states, and political territories across the world, whether as social spaces, historical, political, and economic entities, or as representational images, with their own aesthetic and ethical dimensions. While borders are often seen as fixed, we also know they are mutable, subject to historical shifts, breaching violence and conflict, and still very much alive around the world today. Russia, for instance, invaded Ukraine in 2014. The current conflict in Gaza with Israel has been raging for years, as in so many other territories and borders across the globe. Boundaries mark the division between things, whether as physical, material, social, or personal spaces, among other conceptions. We might be tempted to say that borders are more solid than boundaries, but perhaps both are equally solid, but can likewise ‘melt into air.’ Boundaries can be seen in other ways. They form divisions between what is inside and outside. In architecture, for instance, it is the surfaces of a structure that divide. As anthropologists have noted, buildings create divisions between inside and outside spaces, even when portal windows and doors enable us to see or pass from exterior to interior. The large glass plate windows of modernist architecture, for example, sought to abolish the visual boundary between these spaces.

The formation of inside and outside, then, is a feature of borders and boundaries. It also shapes the basis of identities, communities, and their others, of which photographic representations are themselves a structuring device. If photography is seen, as painting was before it, as a ‘window on the world,’ the ideological drive for transparency, we might also see the skin of the human (or animal) as an essential boundary of the self and its outside. It is a conditional ‘barrier’ between the outside and inside of the body, despite its deconstruction through the very porousness of skin and the orifices through which external materials are ingested, and internal matter expelled. Vision plays a key role here, as mediator of the inside and outside of subjectivity, as it links the critical capacities of photography to present and re-present both internal and external organs for wider circulation. A key apparatus in this formulation is the camera obscura itself. The camera in its historical and new digital forms is an apparatus that operates through the division of space. The dark inside of the camera chamber is the space where the outside three-dimensional material is filtered into an aperture to form a flat two-dimenional image. These examples all show how borders and boundaries, conceived as geographic, political, ecological, social, cultural spaces external to photography, are always implicated subjectively in photography. Its images are a mode of construction; they create, organize, and develop boundaries and borders, as much as they are an instrument for their dissolution, shattering, and dismantling.

This event was organised to address the general and specific interest of photography’s relations and involvement in boundaries and borders. While certain themes were taken up more than others during the conference, this does not mean that other perspectives are not required or less important for future work here or elsewhere. It was striking, for example, that gender boundaries, or the body, and matters of revised differences that ensue from them, had less focus than geographic and social-political categories of borders and boundaries. This circumstance may have been informed by the geographic specificity of our conference. San Antonio, located in south-central Texas, is one-hundred and fifty miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. This border, in the form of barbed wire fencing and the Rio Grande, stretches 1,254 miles from the Gulf of Mexico to El Paso, remains porous even as state and federal agencies have historically made its crossing difficult and dangerous. This border rule, or ‘border imperialism,’ to evoke South Asian activist and writer Harsha Walia’s term (Walia),¹ extends back to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, which forced Mexico to relinquish its claims to Texas by ceding fifty-five percent of its northern territories to the United States, including all or part of present-day border states — Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California — as well as Colorado, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming. Much of this power was built through the ideology of Manifest Destiny. This dogma, a product of U.S. exceptionalism, legitimized the alteration of the boundaries between the U.S. and Mexico as destined by God, thereby establishing present-day territorial divisions and setting the terms for the racial formation of the United States as a white nation-state. Mexicans living on land that had effectively become the U.S., for instance, though given the option of U.S. citizenship, faced ongoing racial discrimination and segregation. While Indigenous people, including the Comanche, Apache, Seri, Coahuiltecan, and Kiowa, were forcibly assimilated into the U.S. nation-state and enslaved Africans remained subject to the Fugitive Slave Act. Our conference took up photography’s complex intersection with this longstanding history of border rule. But as much as it worked to unveil the imperial workings of borders, we also looked to photography’s potential to cross divisions and engender alternate forms of belonging and knowledge production. It is precisely photography’s capacity to fix but also to undo that renders it a vital resource for thinking through the endless permutations of boundaries and borders.

Conference session on Critical Memory (left to right): Zeeynep Devrin Gürsel, Will Wilson, Patricia Hayes Nicolas Lambouris and Erina Duganne (chair).

We include here the original call for papers as a matter of historical reference:

Boundaries and borders

We set out to question how far the longstanding boundaries between private and social, screen and human, camera and body, memory and history, local and global are broken down or called into question by changing social practices. At the same time, when existing boundaries and borders are reasserted and hardened, how do divisions, distinctions and differences develop and mutate our sense of self and outside? The tensions between these movements of fixity and change raise critical questions around the function of boundaries and borders today.

Conference papers should be interested in how these themes intersect in photographic practice and theory. Example questions and issues that papers might address include:

• How has photography served both to uphold and disrupt boundaries and borders?

• How have photographers worked to transform and reimagine boundaries and borders?

• What are the transdisciplinary debates around photography’s boundaries and borders both in terms of its theory and practice?

• What are the challenges and rewards of photography addressing issues of boundaries and borders?

• Are there specific types of practice that privilege boundaries and borders?

• What methods or frameworks and theoretical models are useful for addressing boundaries and borders in photography both in terms of its theory and practice?

• What are the political and ethical ramifications of taking up borders and boundaries through photography?

Conference conveners

David Bate, Professor of Photography, University of Westminster, London, UK

Erina Duganne, Professor of Art History, School of Art And Design, Texas State University, USA

Liz Wells, Emeritus Professor, University of Plymouth, UK

We would like to specifically thank all the contributors to this special issue of the journal, the participants of the conference, Libby Rowe, Professor at UTSA, who helped brilliantly to host the conference event, Blair Bodden for helping with Registration, Xandra Arquin for design of the conference brochure, Catherine Collier for photography, Joe Harjo for the Student show at UTSA, Contemporary at Blue Star and its curator Jacqueline Saragoza McGilvray for hospitality and hosting a discussion about the journal, Routledge for supporting hospitality and UTSA’s School of Art for hosting the conference.

Notes

1. Walia, Border & Rule.