Social Photography and the Politics of Visibility Concentrating on the US-American tradition of social photography, Simon Schleusener’s lecture interrogates attempts to visualize dimensions of inequality that are effectively invisible. While academic discourse on the subject has focused on how the socially disadvantaged are depicted, his talk shifts our attention to representations of social structures that produce inequality and poverty in the first place. Accordingly, he engages with images of degradation that go beyond empathy- or recognition-oriented forms of social photography, examining visual strategies in which the photographic image is transformed from a still image into an image of thought. https://www.nas.uni-bonn.de/en/events/events-collection/social-photography-and-the-politics-of-visibility https://www.nas.uni-bonn.de/++resource++plone-logo.svg

Concentrating on the US-American tradition of social photography, Simon Schleusener’s lecture interrogates attempts to visualize dimensions of inequality that are effectively invisible. While academic discourse on the subject has focused on how the socially disadvantaged are depicted, his talk shifts our attention to representations of social structures that produce inequality and poverty in the first place. Accordingly, he engages with images of degradation that go beyond empathy- or recognition-oriented forms of social photography, examining visual strategies in which the photographic image is transformed from a still image into an image of thought.