History of Photography Journal Special Issue on the Caribbean
History of Photography Journal
Emilie C Boone, guest editor
Special Issue – From Within and Without: The History of Caribbean Photography
This Special Issue borrows its title from a now out-of-print exhibition catalog that first introduced readers to the history of photography from the Caribbean nation of Haiti. NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale’s From Within and Without: The History of Haitian Photography (2015), charts the country’s relationship to the medium of photography from the local introduction of the daguerreotype to projects emerging from the contemporary global art world. Central to this and many of the other published narratives of photography’s history throughout the region is an acknowledgement of the Caribbean’s complex relationship to colonialism; an economy of images circulating through networks spanning space and time; and the medium’s intrinsic role in constructing expansive diasporic communities as well as national legacies.
Interested contributors to this History of Photography Special Issue are invited to submit abstracts of 250 to 500-words in length, along with a brief biography and CV, to guest editor Emilie C. Boone, New York University, at ecb9972@nyu.edu by March 1st, 2025.
As a helpful prompt, contributors are encouraged to consider the following: This Special Issue aims to demonstrate how photography of the Caribbean can be a historically and consequentially rich area for expanding the medium of photography’s regional and global history. Essays that ask broad questions and offer insight into the possibilities and limitations of engaging with photography and the Caribbean are welcomed, as are projects that more specifically aim to highlight individual photographers or photographed subjects from the long duration of the medium’s history in the region. This call also encourages those thinking with and through recent interventions into writing photography’s history to apply innovative approaches to case studies about the Caribbean. For example, as modelled by the co-authors of Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography (2024), how might centering instances of collaboration reframe the various constituents of Caribbean photography?
As the first peer-reviewed journal issue dedicated to the history of photography in and about the Caribbean, this History of Photography Special Issue builds from a significant roster of previous efforts. Existing scholarship has taken shape through nation/city-focused publications including Developing Blackness: Studio Photographs of “Over the Hill” Nassau in the Independence Era (2008), Fotografie in Suriname=Photography in Surinam, 1839-1939 (1991), and Historia De la Fotographía Dominicana: 1851-1961 (2010). Different in focus, other book publications embrace the region more broadly, as in the case of 90 Degrees of Shade:100 Years of Photography in The Caribbean (2010) and The Caribbean in Sepia: A History in Photographs, 1840-1900 (2012) or thematically, such as in An Eye for The Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean (2007) and Creole in the Archive: Imagery, Presence and the Location of the Caribbean Figure (2016).
Additional publications demonstrate photography’s multivalent uses. Of note, in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being Christina Sharpe’s reflections on a photograph of a young girl with the word “ship” on her forehead demonstrates the utility of photographs from the Caribbean as a theoretical prompt for thinking about the African diaspora more broadly. Also, cultural institutions continue to explore the relationship between the Caribbean and photography through exhibitions and published books, as is the case of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) exhibition and catalog by the same name, Fragments of Epic Memory (2021), which draws from the institution’s recently acquired Montgomery Collection of Caribbean Photographs.
The authors featured within the aforementioned publications hail from a range of backgrounds, from institutionally affiliated art historians and museum curators to scholars invested in disciplines outside of those that privilege the visual – such as cultural studies, history, and literature. The region, with all its diversity and complexity, requires such a broad rollcall of thinkers, writers, and makers. The history of Caribbean photography is also indelibly linked to a colonial past. Its more expansive history beyond a colonial gaze is often mark by loss, absence, or lack given the limited archival infrastructure in the region. In order to reckon with such gaps in the region’s history, artists, scholars, and curators have deployed a range of strategies, among them the artistic, literary, and speculative. With this in mind, the From Within and Without: The History of Caribbean Photography issue encourages both historians of photography and those from related research fields to contribute essays that illuminate the various contours of the Caribbean’s relationship to photography across time. How might such efforts enable a new convergence of ideas on the Caribbean and photography?
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Photography as a tool for exploring connections among and between artistic or commercial locales in the Caribbean
- Photography’s role in reframing links between French, Spanish, British and Dutch empires and their former Caribbean colonies or current overseas territories
- Photography’s intersections with race, and particularly Blackness, a term whose meaning morphs and changes depending on the period, place, and demographic
- Caribbean photography and its relationship to quotidian violence, acts of resistance, or worldmaking encounters and possibilities
- Ecological or broader scientific concerns and their photographic antecedents
- Photography in the Caribbean and its institutional or family-based archival infrastructure
- Studies of individual photographers or networks of photographers
- Caribbean photography’s relationship to other artistic and visual media
- Photography’s role in thinking through migration and diaspora in addition to the implications of staying in place or being left behind
- Photography of the Caribbean as a critical space in shaping new methodological or theoretical models of photo history
This History of Photography Special Issue serves as a departure from the more recent direction of the journal —and arguably the field of photo history more generally— in its intentional focus on a particular geographic region. In contrast, thematic-based issues have led the charge of organizing photography’s most pertinent and current inquiries. Recent Special Issues of the journal included The Slide Lecture (2023), Policing (2022), Circulating Photographs (2019), Is Photomontage Over? (2019), Photography and Networks (2017). Such themes illustrate a clear shift away from the nation or collective region-focused History of Photography Special Issues from more than a decade ago, which include Photography in Nineteenth-Century Japan (2009), a volume dedicated to Africa (2010), and The First Hundred Years of Iranian Photography (2013).