文章基本信息

标题：Rituals of Belonging: Negotiating Identity Through Photography
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作者：Bruno Belli Sinder
期刊名称：University of Toronto Art Journal
出版年度：2019
卷号：7
页码：21-32
出版社：University of Toronto
摘要：This paper explores how photography was used by immigrants to Canada in the post-war period as a way of negotiating transnational identities, claiming spaces, and asserting presences. Through the analysis of photographs of and by Portuguese immigrants to Ontario sourced from the David Higgs fonds at the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections at York University, I examine the ways in which family photography functions as a ritual of citizenship and community-building. Amateur family photographs were mostly neglected by scholars of photography, deemed unimportant and of poor quality, until the 1980s. Along with the bottom-up approach from the Cultural Turn in the field of History and the rise of Visual Culture as a discipline, Photography Studies then turned to family photography and the family album as a means of uncovering both public meanings and ideologies and more personal, intimate affects. Borrowing from both the thinking and feeling approaches in Photography Studies, this paper investigates the economic and social contexts that surrounded the production of the images as well as and the affective possibilities they carry. Based on the understanding that taking or posing for a photograph is a ritual rich with symbolic meaning, I argue that immigrants employed the medium as a tool to mediate the delicate act of asserting their presence in a new culture while still preserving ties to the homeland. In the context of displacement caused by migration, participation in the event of photography is a process both affective and political.