Think of national borders beyond mere lines: this invitation guides Nicoletta Grillo’s journey into the Swiss-Italian border, shaped through the lens of photography theory and practice. Moving between contemporary cross-border work and south-north migrations, this study unveils today’s borderscapes as dynamic constellations.

The Surface of Things uncovers how photography shaped—and was shaped by—the cosmopolitan port cities of the Swahili coast. Exploring image-making as both coercion and expression, Prita Meier reveals how photographs circulated as mobile objects of beauty, power, and resistance across the Indian Ocean world.

Tracing the lives and works of five women in four case studies, author Marie Meyerding examines the representation of women in the field of photography in South Africa in the second half of the twentieth century.

In this article-based dissertation, I problematize the concept of photographic materiality in contemporary art, which is currently evolving in two directions. On the one hand there has recently been a new interest in notably tactile methods of photographic image-making as photography is often used in collage, sculpture and mixed media. On the other hand, in the context of digitality, the materiality of the single photographic image seems to have become increasingly irrelevant. Photography in contemporary art is thus at the same time both extremely tactile and material, but also almost immaterial, a non-object. I investigate this materially twofold status through five case studies.

In Shooting for Change, Jung Joon Lee examines postwar Korean photography across multiple genres and practices, including vernacular, art, documentary, and archival photography. Tracing the history of Korean photography while considering what is disguised or lost by framing the history of photography through nationhood, Lee considers the role of photography in shaping memory of historical events, representing the ideal national family, and motivating social movements.

When the National Socialists came to power, New York established itself as a city of arrival for German-speaking photographers who had managed to flee Europe. Photography as a medium was in a state of upheaval at this time, partly due to efforts to establish it as an art form. The exiles, in turn, brought different training, camera types and emigration histories with them. Some had already worked professionally, others had to give up their learned professions and acquired photographic skills through self-tuition. Their artistic strategies in exile in New York therefore also differed. The camera served as a medium for dealing with the metropolis, reflecting on the experience of emigration, building networks and simply surviving economically.

Imaging Animal Industry focuses on the visual culture of the American meat industry between 1890 and 1960. It describes how, during that period, photographs and other images helped to shape public perceptions of industrial-scale meat production.

Plucked straight from my personal diaries and photo library, Thank You for Ruining My Birthday portrays the rejection, loneliness, and uncertainty of dating in NYC after the sudden end of a long-term relationship.

In a collection of images that are both quiet and telling, Sunset Colonies portrays the vulnerabilities experienced by residents of South Florida’s mobile home communities amid rapid urban transformation and the threat of economic displacement. Photographer Diego Waisman captures a fractured sense of place in Miami-area neighborhoods that once flourished but are now increasingly forgotten.

A rethinking of photography through the framework of extraction, Camera Geologica advances an eco-critical reading of photography to consider the material links between mining and image making.

Drawing on extensive research in the archives of the United States Information Agency (USIA) and concentrating on the period from the mid-1950s through to the late 1960s, Darren Newbury traces the role of photography in the United States’ appeal to Africa. Newbury shows how photographing the political, cultural, and educational visits of Africans to the United States provided a space for the imagination of international cooperation and friendship; how the United States presented the civil rights struggle as an example of democracy in action; and how it pictured a world of integration and racial coexistence.

Throughout the apartheid era, South Africa maintained a wide-reaching propaganda apparatus. At its core was the information service that strongly capitalised on photography to visually articulate the minority regime’s racist political messages, promote Afrikaner nationalism, and consolidate White rule. By unearthing a substantial corpus of photographs that so far have been hidden in archives, this book offers a distinctive perspective on the institutional context of the regime’s photographic production and how it was tightly linked to the objective to build a White nation.

Memory Orchards presents a broad survey of family experience, through highs and lows, through lust and loss, creating a survey of work which reflects our understanding of ‘family’ in this moment.

Tracing the shifting meanings of photography in the early Soviet Union, Aglaya K. Glebova reconsiders the relationship between art and politics during what is usually considered the end of the critical avant-garde.

In A Nimble Arc, Emilie Boone considers Van Der Zee’s photographic work over the course of the twentieth century, showing how it foregrounded aspects of Black daily life in the United States and in the larger African diaspora. Boone argues that Van Der Zee’s work exists at the crossroads of art and the vernacular, challenging the distinction between canonical art photographs and the kind of output common to commercial photography studios.

An absorbing exploration of Soviet-era family photographs that demonstrates the singular power of the photographic image to command attention, resist closure, and complicate the meaning of the past.

Photography in Canada, 1839 – 1989: An Illustrated History is the first comprehensive book on the history of photography in Canada. It is available open access online in English and French and will be published in print in the coming months.

Drawing from the author’s personal collection of photo wallets from the 1900s to the 1990s, Annebella Pollen's book charts a century of popular photography in Britain.

Citizens of Photography: The Camera and the Political Imagination is an edited volume that explores the intersections of photography and citizenship, as observed in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Greece, India, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria and Sri Lanka.