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Ceiling as a Sky: On the Strange Meaning of Photographs

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Visual Anthropology Diaries #4   What is a photograph? A representation? A trace? A code? A wound? A terrain of power relations? A relation?   In 2022, I shot on film for the first time. My first roll was taken in Burgas, one of Bulgaria’s largest cities on the Black Sea coast, shaped by maritime labour, the surrounding lakes and the everyday choreography of its harbour. I photographed myself, fishermen, ships and people across streets, carrying the roll around with a mix of excitement and anxiety. With film, you don’t immediately see what you’ve done and there is this productive gap of uncertainty between the act when you capture the ‘moment’ and the result. When the scans finally arrived, I opened them the way you open a letter you have been waiting for, and slightly afraid of what will be inside. I moved through the frames quickly, with relief and disbelief that there was actually something there, and then I stopped. In one of the photographs, there we...
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Imagining the Atom: From a Techno-Modernity Star to a Radioactive Bogeyman [draft]

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(Visual Anthropology Diaries #3) Google Search: “Nuclear energy old posters” If you search for “nuclear [old] energy posters” on Google, you will soon find yourself in an endless spiral of atoms dancing around hundreds of slogans: from such promising technological progress and labour prosperity, though sinister ones condemning nuclear energy and its “victims”, to assuring there’s a “peaceful atomic” future awaiting, and contemporary AI-designed such praising the atomic energy as “cleaner” and “safer”. It’s strangely addictive to pick one object and follow how the images it produces, and the images produced for it, changed across time and space. This is the task I have for this week for my Visual Anthropology and Ethnographic filmmaking class at CEU. So I thought, why not use this opportunity to look at different representations of how this one peculiar substance that has always fascinated me –  nuclear energy – has travelled through visual culture in the past and present, in the Un...
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