What We're Reading
1
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, "Seeing Genocide", Boston Review, 2023
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay writes on how Israel’s weaponization of images since October 7 obfuscates its genocidal campaign against Palestinians.
2
Vindhya Buthpitiya, "How to Capture Birds of Freedom: Picturing Tamil Women at War", Trans Asia Photography, 2023.
Vindhya Buthpitiya examines the uses of images of women fighters of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam during and after the Sri Lankan civil war (1983–2009) to explore the contrasting mobilizations of visual representations of Tamil women cadres, focusing on the cultivation and framing of contradictory nationalist imaginaries by competing ethnic and state actors.
3
Santasil Mallik, "GI Photos of Calcutta: Toward a Vernacular Understanding of War", Trans Asia Photography, 2023.
Santasil Mallik undertakes a semiotic reading of World War II military photographs by Clyde Waddell to situate the complex location of the American GIs in Calcutta, the erstwhile capital city of the disintegrating British colony.
4
Jatin Gulati, "Notes on Southasian photography beyond borders", Himal Southasian, 2023.
Jatin Gulati writes on Rahaab Allana’s 'Unframed' and the way it explores how lens-based practices confront the divided realities of South Asia, yet also point to the region’s overlaps and entanglements.
5
Diane Smyth, "On the ground at Arles 2023", 1854.photography, 2023.
BJP’s editor Diane Smyth reports on the opening week of Les Rencontres d'Arles 2023.
6
Izabela Radwanska Zhang, "Kin Coedel’s ode to Tibet’s yak-yarn craft artists", 1854.photography, 2023.
Kin Coedel tells the story of a nomadic community who stayed true to their traditions when China’s rapidly growing economy threatened Tibet’s way of life.
7
Opal Kiyoko, "The Chess Players' Lore", ArtAsia Pacific, 2022.
Opal Kiyoko writes on Satyajit Ray's Shatranj Ke Khiladi (The Chess Players) (1977), which depicts the annexation of the kingdom of Awadh by the East India Company even as two landed gentries neglect their families and obsess over the game of chess.
8
Olga Rodríguez-Ulloa, "Sadistic Chola Manifesto", e-Flux Journal, 2023.
Olga Rodríguez-Ulloa writes on "chola" politics and and how its manifestations are challenging coloniality, patriarchy, and individualism.
9
Arvind Rajagopal, "Postcommunist Aesthetics: A Conversation with Anamika Haksar" e-flux Journal, 2021.
Arvind Rajagopal writes about Anamika Haksar’s 2018 Ghode Ko Jalebi Khilane Le Ja Riya Hoon and how she addresses a problem of representation that haunts Indian cinema: How to portray a stratified society to itself?
10
Ariel Goldberg and Yazan Khalili, "We Stopped Taking Photos”, e-flux Journal, 2021.
Ariel Goldberg and Yazan Khalili write about why they stopped taking pictures and somehow ended up teaching graduate students of photography together; also sharing the syllabus they come up with as a response to this crisis.
11
Alan Teller and Jerri Zbiral, “ Following the Box: Exploring an Archive of Anonymous Photographs from India ", Trans Asia Photography, 2018.
Curators Alan Teller and Jerri Zbiral write about finding a shoebox full of 127 of negatives and prints, made in India in 1945 by a U.S. soldier stationed in rural West Bengal, at an estate sale in Chicago years later.
