This article explores the following question: at the end of the nineteenth century, how did the scientific community, among others, come to be increasingly preoccupied with underwater photography, and how could this world, and its attributes, be made visible?

In June 2003, the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh mounted an exhibition of Warhol's iconic Electric Chair print series—ten large-scale prints along with several smaller prints and paintings—as a catalyst to generate discourse on the issue of capital punishment. The project, Andy Warhol's Electric Chairs: Reflecting on Capital Punishment in America, which came two years after the execution of Timothy McVeigh and shortly after the decision by Illinois Governor George Ryan to commute all death sentences in that state, raised significant questions about the social utility and morality of the death penalty.

Jordache A. Ellapen reflects on his photographic project, Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy, which blends photographs from his family archive with contemporary portraits shot in a studio. The work examines the intersections of race, sexuality, and eroticism as they relate to the in/visibility of black and brown queer bodies and subjectivities in South Africa.

Jenny Sharpe considers the visual power of the imperial picturesque. Analyzing touristic photography of Indian field workers in the Caribbean, Sharpe argues that a “coolie picturesque” simultaneously reveals and conceals the permanent settlement of Indians and their racial mixing with Afro-Jamaicans.

Analyzing the staging and composition of archival photography of South Asian laborers in 19th-century Jamaica, Anna Arabindan-Kesson reflects upon the role of photography in evoking particular colonial narratives about indenture, the perception of Indian laborers’ assimilability, and Jamaica’s modernization.

Drawing on her own family history and the artworks of three mixed-media artists, Tao Leigh Goffe explores how visual art can produce a global transoceanic conception of Afro-Asia. How do Albert Chong, Richard Fung, and Tomie Arai use vernacular photography to examine the affective ties of diaspora? 

We owe others our language, our history, our art, our survival, our neighborhood, our relationships, … our ability to defy social conventions as well as support these conventions. All of this we learn from others. None of us is alone; each of us is dependent on others.

–Toni Morrison

The challenge was...

In the endless debate between the old and the new, does sentimentality get in the way? How do we reconcile the desire to preserve the urban landscapes of the past with the need to meet the living needs of the present?

In his final film, the late Iranian director pushes the boundary between photography and film to its limit by breaking down the distinction between moment and duration. This reimagination of form would never have been possible without Kiarostami’s openness to digital techniques.