Editorial

Abstract

The papers in this issue suggest a renewed interest in what used to be a dichotomy between the ‘politics of representation’ or the ‘representation of politics’. The debate seems no longer a dichotomy, the old distinction about either paying attention to the matter of the images themselves or the political subject represented are combined in new interrogative interests. Cherine Fahd tackles the image of the mother across different fields of media articulation in ‘The Mother Thing in Pictures: from Antagonism to Affection’. Philip Charrier Shantel LaBar considers the image of the trans body in the early 1980s photobook by Christer Strömhom. The 1980s figure again in Louise Bethlehem and Norma Musih’s essay on Afrapix collective photography of late-Apartheid South Africa. Boyoung Chang’s essay addresses absences and presences in Chinese photography of the 1990s. Hugo Silveira Pereira takes up the longer narrative of ‘progress’ in engineering and social infrastructure that photographers in Portugal were employed to supply. Ariel Evans considers the influential 1970s theoretical framing by the poet David Antin and impact photography and education in California and photography work informing later work by Alan Sekula, Martha Rosler and many others. Erica Larsson examines the representation of the Swedish Sarek alpine areas and the role of the photographic image in its public presentation. All of these papers, submitted independently to the journal, are informed by different traditions, locations and modes of argument, yet at the same time show a renewed interest in critical writings that engage with actual practices and their effects on the constitution and ‘social construction’ of the world. Perhaps one of the inadvertent effects of Covid-19 ‘lockdown’ is an increased attention to the question of the social image and its value? Later this year we shall be hosting our Third International Photographies conference, this time in Texas USA. See https://www.tandfonline.com/action/ newsAndOffers?journalCode=rpho20.