Cementing of an Empire

In this photo essay on the Regias del Drag competition in Monterrey, Mexico, photographer Laura Alvarez meditates on the experiences, identities, and things that comprise northern Mexico’s queer communities.

Refocusing the Anthropocenic Gaze: A Photo Essay

In the process of bringing about the Anthropocene, humanity has become accustomed to taking up a considerable amount of space. This tendency can spill over into how we as humans take up space within our own photographs, too (such as selfies that fill the entirety of the image frame). As contrast, this minimalist photo essay offers alternative visual perspectives through posthuman photography. Alongside earth-tone photographs from the author in Belgium and the Netherlands, captions illustrate how we can refocus, rescale, and reframe everyday photographs that position (post)humanity within the contexts of our planet and the epoch in which we live. In photo essay form, text and images show how us how we can decelerate and refocus the Anthropocenic gaze.

The Terms of the Text

Chapter 9 examines how unconventional written work is currently pushing the limits of our understanding of genre. Women from elsewhere are drawing from personal experience in order to disturb tired distinctions between “text” and “life” in imaginative fashions that reconfigure the reading experience. Their creative work is contributing to liberating these authors from overworked modes of expression and worn expectations, and allows them to break free from rigid definitions. It is significant that a number of worldwide women writers are now opting to compose works in a variety of creative forms ranging from the bande dessinée to the journal to the photo essay to récits of all sorts, expanding our conceptions of generic classification by playing with everything from titles to formats within the written work. This inventiveness includes a great deal of attention to visual arts and music, occasionally through the integration of works of art and musical notations in the text itself, and other times through allusions to artistic and musical pieces, or even through the construction of passages that liken literature to these other art forms. Authors are more and more impressively contributing to their own publishing profiles by writing “autobiographically” in variations that elude any clear categorization, but that reveal intimate details in texts that embody movement, progression, and development in exciting new terms.

Empathic Projections: Visual Anthropology Design and Acknowledgement

Averting or embracing our capacity for acknowledgement results from what we are willing to take-in what there is to see. In this sense, the photo essay in general confronts us with the limits of our capacities. This essay attempts to examine how it is that the photo essay and its design contend with imagination and acknowledgment. Considering recent editorial initiatives and a redesign of Visual Anthropology Review, and, in greater depth, Feldman and Pérez’s photo essay “Living at the LUX: Homelessness and improvisational waiting under COVID-19,” this essay asks: How does the photo essay—and relatedly, the photograph—in its looks face the possibility of a resistance to acknowledge the reality it depicts?

A Creative Pedagogue's Inquiry through Images: Does it Have Wings?

In this photo essay, I enact how a creative pedagogue engages with artistic practice and contemplative inquiry. As a poet, at home in words, photography represents a creative risk. This vulnerability is felt in the sharing of the work through the lens of (re)search. Hence, I ask: Does it have wings? By delving in expressive forms toward the service of understanding my personal and pedagogical self, creative risk is rewarded in profound ways. I have discovered that my art practice is driven by intention, intuition and imagination. Thus, here is my creative pedagogy in action illuminating how an inquiry through images provokes learning and teaching. Both poetry and photography provide keen vision—a way of sensing and seeing Light.

“Vamos te levar no ponto mais alto daqui”: conhecendo ações da terapia ocupacional com crianças/"We'll take you to the highest point here": knowing occupational therapy actions with children

Objetivo: Este ensaio fotográfico propõe pensarmos as práticas com as crianças nos mais diversos territórios, em diálogos constantes com suas realidades e contextos. Descrição da imagem: é trazida uma imagem de duas crianças numa comunidade urbana e a interlocução com a terapeuta ocupacional, em que mostram seus espaços de significado e de sentidos, em meio ao território, e nos fazem repensar, juntamente com as demais imagens ao longo do texto, as ações territoriais e práticas com crianças a partir e em diálogo com suas realidades e a produção das imagens por elas como apropriação do espaço.Palavras-chave: Criança. Fotografia. Terapia Ocupacional AbstractObjective: this photo essay proposes to think about the practices with children in the most diverse territories, in constant dialogues with their realities and contexts. Image description: An image of two children in an urban community is brought and the dialogue with the occupational therapist, in which they show their spaces of meaning and meanings in the middle of the territory and make us rethink, together with the other images throughout the text, the territorial and practical actions with children from and in dialogue with their realities and the production of images by them as appropriation of space.Keywords: Children. Photography. Occupational Therapy ResumenObjetivo: este ensayo fotográfico propone pensar las prácticas con los niños en los más diversos territorios, en diálogos constantes con sus realidades y contextos. Descripción de la imagen: se trae una imagen de dos niños en una comunidad urbana y el diálogo con el terapeuta ocupacional, en el que muestran sus espacios de significado y significados en medio del territorio y nos hacen repensar, junto con las otras imágenes a lo largo del texto, las acciones territoriales y prácticas con los niños desde y en diálogo con sus realidades y la producción de imágenes por ellos como apropiación del espacio.Palavras Clave: Niños y Niñas. Fotografía. Terapia Ocupacional