Citizens of Photography explores how photography offers access to forms of citizenship beyond those available through ordinary politics. Through contemporary ethnographic investigations of photographic practice in Nicaragua, Nigeria, Greece, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, the PhotoDemos Collective traces the resonances between political representation and photographic representation. The authors emphasize photography as lived practice and how photography’s performative, transformative, and transgressive possibilities facilitate the articulation of new identities. They analyze photography ranging from family albums and social media to state and public archives, showing how it points to new destinations in the context of social movements, the aftermath of atrocity and civil war, and the legacies of past injustices. By foregrounding photography’s open-ended and contingent nature and its ability to subvert and reconfigure conventional political identifications, this volume demonstrates that as much as photography looks to the past, it points to the future, acting in advance of social reality.

“Ambitious in its theoretical and ethnographic reach, this vital volume robustly explores the unruly political potentialities of photography while laying out multiple directions for a future anthropology of photography. Citizens of Photography is a landmark book.” - Karen Strassler, author of (Demanding Images: Democracy, Mediation, and the Image-Event in Indonesia) "Citizens of Photography is a coherent whole. It is both a theoretical and participant-observational work in anthropology, and thankfully, the latter does not get trumped by the former. The volume would be accessible to a variety of disciplinary orientations, and the chapters work in tandem or for stand-alone use in undergraduate or graduate courses. In short, Citizens of Photography is a welcome addition to any cannon related to media, visual, or political anthropology." - Leighton C. Peterson (Visual Communication Quarterly) "For the careful reader, untold stories of unknown photographers and cultural tropes emerge that reveal worlds of photographic and ethnographic practice from many countries often ignored by Anglo-American historians. How do other cultures use photography? This volume answers this question and analyzes the results. Recommended. General readers through faculty." - R. Hackemann (Choice)

Christopher Pinney is Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College London and author of The Waterless Sea: A Curious History of Mirages.

Naluwembe Binaisa researches mobilities, belonging, and citizenship within Africa.

Vindhya Buthpitiya is Associate Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews.

Konstantinos Kalantzis is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Thessaly.

Ileana L. Selejan is Lecturer in Art History, Culture, and Society at the University of Edinburgh.

Sokphea Young is an honorary Research Fellow at University College London.