In this issue, TAP continues to broaden the scope of photography in Asia and across its diasporas, including contributions that center visual practices in Tamil Nadu, Papua, North Korea, South Korea, India, and in ethnic Chinese enclaves in North America. Some of the themes that cross these various studies include the interplay between the local and transnational ways of seeing in terms of images and their meanings; the productive nature of photos to enhance, rather than just reflect, power, especially in settler colonial contexts; and the importance of counter-archives—of personal and commercial images—to tell different histories of photo and different histories in general.
In “George Floyd in Papua: Image-Events and the Art of Resonance,” Karen Strassler theorizes how the visual culture that emerged as part of protests in response to the killing of George Floyd in the US constitutes what she theorizes as an “image-event.” Defining the image-event as “a politically consequential process in which an image and its proliferating iterations precipitate powerful and at times unpredictable affective and discursive responses,” she focuses on responses to it in Papua New Guinea, illuminating their resonances with and divergences from the complex racial histories of blackness within the local context.
Shimrit Lee also examines the significance of the transnational projection of the visual, focusing on the ways that US frontier ideology was imposed in the context of Zionist expansion in West Asia. In “‘Then and Now’: The Making of a Visual Frontier,” Lee demonstrates how photography provided visual justification for the settler colonialist expropriation of land in Palestine.
Zoé E. Headley's article underscores the importance of archival resources in preserving overlooked histories and facilitating research that expands understanding of Indian photography. In “Three Histories and Seven Lives: Investigating the Archives of South Indian Photo Studios, Tamil Nadu, 1880–1980,” Headley provides a fascinating account of the star.archive, a digital project that preserves oral histories and digitized images of studio photography in South India, which she persuasively demonstrates is an important and valuable resource for historical research on an often overlooked area of study.
Hye-ri Oh's interview with South Korean documentary photographer Joo Myung Duck spotlights another digital archive project, the Korean Artists' Digital Archive. Indeed, Korean photography is well represented in this issue, which also includes a review by So Jeong Chung of the recent symposium, “Photography and Korea: History and Practice,” co-organized by TAP editorial board member Jeehey Kim. Tong Lam's visual essay “At the Borderland of History” examines the visual representation of North Korea, or rather the perspective provided through touristic views. Although images of North Korea are carefully controlled by the state, restricting tourists in terms of where and what they may photograph and limiting the visual repertoire to clichéd images, Lam's reflections, informed by his own critical positioning growing up in Macau in view of fraught border zones, provide insight into Chinese ways of seeing the complexly converging and diverging histories of socialist visuality.
In “Invisible Journey,” Deborah Nixon also provides a personal perspective in her visual essay, which examines the photographs taken by her father, an Anglo-Indian Gurkha who was a witness to the Partition of India, and the significance of these images in documenting this tumultuous moment in South Asian history.
Finally, in their critical conversation, Morris Lum and Brandon Leung consider the political potential of a Chinatown vernacular, as displayed Lum's works, which focus on ethnic enclaves in North America. “Tong Yan Gaai: A North American Chinatown Vernacular” reflects on the changing contours of rapidly gentrifying cities in Canada and the US. With a focus on Toronto and Vancouver, they consider how the photographic documentation of the Chinatown vernacular serves as a means of preserving heritage for diasporic communities.
