RESEARCH
I am interested in the politics of visibility and invisibility, most often in warfare but also in political conflicts. How have the strategies, tactics, and practices of representation — especially spectacle and surveillance — shifted over time and what are the consequences of those shifts? The relationship between war and non-war, questions of temporality, the role of the market in counterinsurgency, and the aesthetics and genre instability of documentary photography are thick threads through my research. These concerns are at once ethnographic, theoretical, and political; registers that I interweave in my writing and creative work.
My fieldwork in Colombia dates back to 2001 and includes the completion of three major projects that you can learn more about on this site: Guerrilla Marketing, Shooting Cameras for Peace, and Limbo.
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I complement my abiding interest in media politics and the Colombian conflict with an intellectual interest in parsing the continuities and ruptures presented by social media, as well as the changing modes of documentary practice in the digital age.
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To access my publications, please see my page on e-Scholarship, the University of California’s open access repository.
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Photo courtesy of Gena Steffens
I am currently working on two books about Colombian photography, one historical the other contemporary. I have provisional titles for both, The Politics of Parallax: The World of and the World in Colombian Photography, 1950–2000 and Transitional Visions: Creative Photojournalism in Post-Peace Accord Colombia.
I am also in the research and pre-production phase for a documentary film about an uncle of mine who was likely kidnapped as part of what is most commonly known as the “Yemeni Children Affair” in Israel (though it involved Jews from all over the Middle East and the Balkans). My father’s family immigrated from Iraq to Israel in 1951 and this uncle was born with the name of Eliyahu (after my great grandfather). He nursed from my grandmother for two days before hospital authorities told my grandparents that he had died but never allowed them to see the infant’s dead body.