Written in the context of unprecedented dislocation and a global refugee crisis, this edited volume thinks through photography’s long and complex relationship to human migration. While contemporary media images largely frame migration in terms of trauma, victimhood, and pity, so much more can be said of photography’s role in the movement of people around the world. Cameras can document, enable, or control human movement across geographical, cultural, and political divides. Their operators put faces on forced and voluntary migrations, making visible hardships and suffering as well as opportunity and optimism. Photographers include migrating subjects who take pictures for their own consumption, not for international recognition. And photographs themselves migrate with their makers, subjects, and viewers, as the very concept of photography takes on new functions and meanings. Photography and Migration places into conversation media images and other photographs that the contributors have witnessed, collected, or created through their diverse national, regional, and local contexts. Developed across thirteen chapters, this conversation encompasses images, histories, and testimonies offering analysis of new perspectives on photography and migration today.

Today, more people than ever are fleeing persecution and war. Over 68 million people are on the move worldwide, according to the UN's latest figures. With his new book "Migration as Avant-Garde," Michael Danner delivers a moving, critical, and thought-provoking contribution to the current public debate. He skillfully deploys a variety of elements and combines his own photos and texts with historic images. The result is a consistent but multifaceted narrative, which is frequently deconstructed both in terms of design and content. While the title at first seems somewhat bewildering, it becomes self-explanatory in the course of reading the quotations, interspersed throughout the book, from Hannah Arendt's 1943 essay "We Refugees." The events that Arendt wrote about more than seventy years--giving up one's home, one's friends, family, and language--are more pressing today than ever before. In search of progress, driven by the desire for a better future, and risking their lives, people both then and now hit the road, break through physical and psychological boundaries, and thus provide our society with new perspectives and ways of thinking.

Haunting and revealing photographs sent home by Norwegian immigrants in America as visual document and collective expression of the emigrant experience Between 1836 and 1915, in what has been called history’s largest population migration, more than 750,000 Norwegians emigrated to North America. Writing home, the newcomers sent thousands of pictures—America–photographs, as they are called in Norway. In these photographs, the emigrant experience unfolds as framed by thousands of Norwegian transplants in towns, cities, and rural communities across America. Pictures of Longing brings more than 250 America–photographs into focus as a moving account of Norwegian migration in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, conceived of and crafted by its photographer-authors to shape and reshape their story. To clarify the historic nature and the cultural function of the America-photographs, art historian and photography scholar Sigrid Lien located thousands of the photographs in public and private archives and museums in Norway and the United States. Reading these photographs alongside letters sent home by Norwegian immigrants, Lien provides the first comprehensive account of this collective photographic practice involving “the voice of the many.” Pictures of Longing shows, in fascinating detail, how the photographs, like the accompanying letters, contribute to the cultural grassroots expression of Norwegian migration. They steer us toward multiple, fragmented, and dispersed histories and also complement the existing fabric of established historical narratives, demonstrating photography’s potential to engage with history.

How should the people that initiated a journey be remembered? What obligations arise as a result of their passing away? What role do films and photographs play in the process of memorialisation? Drawing on the events surrounding the arrival of the author's family in Australia from Cyprus, The Old Greeks traces how film and photography serve as toolkits for making sense of the experience of migration - at the level of everyday life and creative practice. 'The cinema is not just an art, a culture, ' Jean Mitry once wrote, 'but a means to knowledge...not just a technique for disseminating facts but one capable of opening thought onto new horizons.' George Kouvaros reveals how deeply the perceptual and emotional displacements that define migration are embedded in the forms of thinking produced by photographic media. Combining techniques and methods associated with autobiography, with those associated with critical analysis, The Old Greeks develops a form of writing that approaches complex social and cultural issues with intimacy. It also marks an acknowledgement that migration and the crossing of boundaries can pave the way for new forms of writing that challenge distinctions between literary genre and style. The outcome can be viewed as a new aesthetics of migration shedding light on the complex forms of human interaction surrounding photography and film

In The Migrant Image T. J. Demos examines the ways contemporary artists have reinvented documentary practices in their representations of mobile lives: refugees, migrants, the stateless, and the politically dispossessed. He presents a sophisticated analysis of how artists from the United States, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East depict the often ignored effects of globalization and the ways their works connect viewers to the lived experiences of political and economic crisis. Demos investigates the cinematic approaches Steve McQueen, the Otolith Group, and Hito Steyerl employ to blur the real and imaginary in their films confronting geopolitical conflicts between North and South. He analyzes how Emily Jacir and Ahlam Shibli use blurs, lacuna, and blind spots in their photographs, performances, and conceptual strategies to directly address the dire circumstances of dislocated Palestinian people. He discusses the disparate interventions of Walid Raad in Lebanon, Ursula Biemann in North Africa, and Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri in the United States, and traces how their works offer images of conflict as much as a conflict of images. Throughout Demos shows the ways these artists creatively propose new possibilities for a politics of equality, social justice, and historical consciousness from within the aesthetic domain.

"A visual road trip across America ... sixteen renowned photographers take us coast to coast, celebrating a country whose land is as varied as its people. ... As you view the 140 photos in the book, you are directed to a Web site [http://migrationmusic.org/] with accompanying songs composed by photographer and songwriter Donald McCrea, and performed by him along with some of the top musicians in the San Francisco Bay Area ..."--Press release.