Abstract

This introduction to a special section on ‘Photography and the State’ reflects on trends in photography theory exemplified in essays by Jens Andermann, Ariella Azoulay, Andrea Noble, and Bronwyn Law-Viljoen. It suggests that the contributors make a powerful argument for photography’s emergent contribution to theories of the state and of sovereignty. It situates this work in the context of a growing body of scholarship (by theorists such as Natalia Brizuela, Paula Cortés-Rocca, Clare Harris, Chris Pinney, and Karen Strassler) attuned to photography’s role in political imagination in post-colonial and post-imperial spaces, and underscores movement of the field away from inter-subjective conceptions of photographic ethics and debates about indexicality.