Photo State: A Public Lecture by Christopher Pinney

In honour of World Photography Day, ASAP | art hosted a public lecture by Prof Christopher Pinney on 19 August 2022, titled Photo State. In his presentation, Pinney spoke about the project "PhotoDemos/Citizens of Photography: The Camera and the Political Imagination", supported by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council. The central concept driving this work was the “citizenship of photography”, an idea proposed by the scholar Ariella Azoulay. Pinney presented an overview of the anthropological inquiries conducted by the research group as they explored various regions of the Global South with a focus on the politics of images. His own contributions foregrounded rural Central India, a region Pinney has been researching since 1982, studying “demotic” photography, highlighting Dalit assertion and visibility. Structured formally alongside Roland Barthes’ seminal text Camera Lucida, Pinney positioned Indian photographic practices as they may be theorised within “world systems of photography” outside of mere “localisation”. In this edited excerpt of the talk, moderated by Senjuti Mukherjee, Pinney introduces Citizens of Photography: The Camera and the Political Imagination (Duke University Press, forthcoming, 2023), which he co-edited with The Photo Demos Collective, to shed light on some of the crucial questions explored by the project.

Christopher Pinney is Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College London. Pinney’s research has a strong geographic focus in Central India. His initial ethnographic research was concerned with village-resident factory workers. Subsequently, he researched popular photographic practices and the consumption of Hindu chromolithographs in the same area. His publications combine contemporary ethnography with the historical archaeology of particular media, including his seminal books Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (1997) and Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (2004). His other publications include Photography’s Other Histories (2003, edited with Nicolas Peterson), The Coming of Photography in India (2008), Photography and Anthropology (2011) and Artisan Camera: Studio Photography from Central India (2013, with Suresh Punjabi).

(Featured image courtesy of Christopher Pinney.)

Recorded on 19 August 2022.

To learn more about Christopher Pinney’s work, read Anisha Baid’s two part explication of his essay “Seven Theses on Photography” and Arushi Vats’ reflection on the archive of Suresh Punjabi.