Vision and Veiling:

From Censorship to Containment: Photography Exhibitions and Strategies of Resilience in Turkey, 2000–2023

 Over the last two decades, censorship affecting photography exhibitions in Turkey has shifted from direct political and military intervention toward more decentralized forms of administrative, corporate, algorithmic, and social control. This paper examines that transformation through a series of institutional case studies spanning from 2000 to 2023, focusing on how photographers, curators, and cultural organizations have responded to changing conditions of visibility and restriction.

 The presentation explores how “red lines” have been constructed around political opposition, Kurdish identity, LGBT+ representation, and religious sensitivities. Rather than banning images outright, contemporary censorship increasingly operates through selective practices of veiling that restrict circulation, sponsorship, institutional support, and public access while often leaving the image itself intact.

 Drawing on examples ranging from the 2002 National Geographic/İFSAK Afghanistan text dispute to the withdrawal of the 2023 exhibition İmroz’un 1964 Belleği, the paper traces the evolution of censorship mechanisms from direct intervention to administrative containment, sponsorship pressure, social media targeting campaigns, and bureaucratic vetting. These cases reveal how exhibition spaces have become contested sites where visibility is negotiated among state institutions, private actors, cultural organizations, and networked publics.

 The paper also examines strategies of resilience developed in response to these pressures, including the 2002 double-tiered “sandwich hanging” at the Press Museum, the use of symbolic black voids to mark censored absences, institutional boycotts, and the migration of restricted projects to autonomous digital platforms.

 The Turkish case reveals a broader transition from direct coercion to dispersed forms of containment while demonstrating how photographic practitioners continue to develop new forms of curatorial, institutional, and visual resilience.

Ozan Yavuz is a photographer, researcher, and lecturer at Middle East Technical University whose work explores photography, visual culture, and emerging imaging technologies. His current research focuses on artificial intelligence, photographic knowledge, and the philosophical possibilities of rethinking photography beyond Western traditions.

“Paper Monuments”: Cityscape Magazine and the Remapping of Washington, D.C.

 Outsiders often perceive Washington, D.C. as paradoxically iconic and placeless. This contradiction, African American studies scholar Brandi Thompson Summers has suggested, comes from a distinctly racialized perceptual division: “‘D.C.’ is Black and ‘Washington’ is white.” This paper mines the context of the 1976 Bicentennial as fertile ground for photographic reimaginings of Black Washington. I examine the student magazine Cityscape, produced by high school documentarians at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. Students combined historical and new photographs, explored local geography through remembrances of older Washingtonians, and investigated contemporary activists and community groups. I argue that Cityscape students remapped the District by filling in gaps left by fractured and incomplete archives and sensationalized media representations. Appropriating the term “pictures generation” to refer to the vernacular practices of young people during the 1970s and ‘80s, this paper joins scholarship considering the 1970s as a flashpoint for documentary experimentation. Student photojournalism practices across the U.S. were not parroting existing media, but repurposing photography to convey new narratives about their communities. Cityscape was both bolstered and constrained by funding and associations with local and national networks. Supported by the D.C. Bicentennial Commission, local Neighborhood Planning Councils, and associated with the “Foxfire” model of student journalism, Cityscape plumbed the implications of celebrating the Bicentennial in Washington. Borrowing from Faye Gleisser’s concept of “punitive literacy,” I demonstrate how student documentarians smuggled in trenchant critiques of Bicentennial celebrations and expanded and complicated expected perceptions of the nation’s capital city during a time when D.C. residents lacked political representation as well as self-determined media representation.

Jesse Dritz is a PhD candidate in the American Studies Program at Boston University. She studies twentieth-century photography and material culture.

An image and its many publics: political restagings of Vladimir Herzog’s Staged Suicide Photograph under the Brazilian Civil-Military Dictatorship and Beyond

 The Civil-Military Dictatorship (1964–1985) generated some of the most emblematic images in Brazilian political history. One of these is the photograph of journalist Vladimir Herzog hanging in a cell at DOI-CODI in São Paulo in an “impossible position” — with his feet, and almost his knees, touching the ground. Originally staged to absolve state agents involved in the journalist’s murder under torture, the suicide photograph was later resignified as its exact opposite: a symbol of state violence, mobilized in political claims against the dictatorship.

 But how and why did this political transformation of the image take place? This research argues that the photograph’s ability both to reproduce and to dismantle the social order enacted by the military lies in its potential to mobilize publics—a potential realized only through the process of circulation. With this in mind, the research examines the history of the photograph’s distribution, seeking to trace the associations established among the multiple

political actors who engaged with it across three distinct moments: first, within the juridical sphere organized by the military, where it functioned as evidence both to acquit the regime and to terrorize its opponents; second, following its publication in the press, still during the dictatorship, where it mobilized political claims against the state while circumventing censorship; and third, in the aftermath of the dictatorship, when it became an icon around which disputes over the memorialization of the dictatorship crystallized.

João Felipe R. Ferreira is a researcher, cultural producer, and independent curator from Brazil, working at the intersection of art, human rights critique, and media theory. He holds an M.A. in Human Rights and the Arts from Bard College (2026) and is currently pursuing an M.A. in Media Studies at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp). He also holds a B.A. in Media Studies (2023) from the same university.

Clandestine Camera: Deep Politics and Photographic Intelligence

 This paper traces the complex relationship between photographic intelligence gathering and the evolving landscape of the United States national security state. Focusing on the intersection of photoreconnaissance, intelligence operations, and governmental secrecy, I begin by looking to the early Cold War nuclear arms race, which led to significant advancements in photographic technology. Overhead photoreconnaissance conducted from spy planes and satellites fitted with high-resolution camera systems became the most successful method of gathering intelligence on Soviet weapons capabilities and military installations and has since become essential to maintenance of US global dominance.

 While conventional accounts of overhead reconnaissance development emphasize technological innovation and military strategy, this investigation connects aerial and satellite imaging systems to networks of covert action, elite power, and secrecy. Photographic intelligence gathering has intersected with foreign intervention, propaganda, and domestic political scandals. Through discussion of powerful institutional figures and the formation of the modern US intelligence apparatus, I outline the political milieu in which reconnaissance technologies were developed and demonstrate how photographic evidence can be mobilized, concealed, or selectively revealed in support of political objectives.

 Photoreconnaissance and other intelligence operations produce classified images that I refer to as "deep photography." The term is inspired by Peter Dale Scott's concept of deep politics: “all those political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually repressed rather than acknowledged.” Defining deep photography as photographic intelligence that is classified, redacted, destroyed, or leaked, I argue that photographic operations and technologies have been central to not only to intelligence gathering but the production and regulation of political knowledge.

Evan Hume is an artist educator based in Ames, Iowa, where he is assistant professor of photography at Iowa State University. He has published two photography monographs with Daylight Books: Viewing Distance (2021) and Critical Collection (2025).