From the Editor

Welcome to a new year and the first issue of Afterimage Volume 51. We hope you enjoyed our special 50th anniversary issue (published in December 2023); do let us know what resonated with you most or how you might use these new pieces reflecting on earlier published texts in your scholarship or classroom. We are looking forward to publishing broad and deep coverage and providing an open venue for fresh ideas and diverse voices for many years to come.We begin this new volume with a photo essay by Parin Dossa who first recounts how the British colonization of Uganda (1894–1961) led to her family’s displacement. She reflects on how the “subdued narrative of the correlation between colonization and displacement” relates to the situation in Afghanistan and the diaspora across countries such as Canada, where her family settled. Asking, “How do we work toward an ethics of coexistence?,” Dossa suggests that photography helps to address this goal of seeing ourselves “as people inhabiting planet Earth rather than residing within politicized boundaries of ‘them’ and ‘us,’” and demonstrates her approach through an examination of documentary images from her own anthropological studies.In our second essay, Yazan Alloujami discusses “art and the prosthetic gaze,” tracking how, “today, the spectator’s agency is reduced to whether or not to take a picture, while the artist’s is reduced to whether or not the work catches attention.” Alloujami writes that “the new mode of seeing is swiping,” arguing that “only by dereifying the online will the offline be saved and vice-versa.”Three feature articles provide the centerpiece of this issue. Michael Anthony Turcios explores how Jordan Peele’s 2022 film Nope critiques extractive capitalism. In focusing on how the film “mobilizes fabulation to explore cinema’s erasure of Blackness from its history as an example of racial extraction,” Turcios demonstrates how Peele’s use of the “trope of the alien-monster as a metaphor” to comment on anthropogenic threats also “makes a pointed critique of human misuse of media technologies due to an insatiable avarice for notoriety.”DB Bauer has developed the term 3D transversal media “out of the persistent need for a shorthand umbrella term for this specific kind of 3D media that defies extant media terminology.” Bauer delves into how “the dual meaning of media drives its broad usage within media studies” and how “transversal media can move from one location to another.” Bauer explains how these media move not only to and from, but across file format, medium and interface, software and platform, affordance and application, as well as diverse communities of practice, and uses Thutmose’s bust of Nefertiti as a vibrant cross-platform example. “Taking a medium-specific approach to transversal media,” Bauer argues, “makes possible new forms of analysis, creativity, and application.”Dale Hudson shares how the works of Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir challenge the erasure of Palestine and Palestinians and highlights how the economics of the industry function as a response to both story and politics. By telling stories with protagonists who can seem like “unruly subjects” to foreign funders, the films can be seen as “unruly subjects” to critics as well. Hudson concludes, “To remain Palestinian, stories cannot be reduced to universal humanism or sacrificed to neoliberal market economies. They have a responsibility to represent community.”We start our reviews section with Chelsea Shi-Chao Liu on the exhibition Charlotte Zhang: Paradise Holds Itself Shut, which was recently on view at Goes to Ocean, in Koreatown, Los Angeles. Zhang’s multimedia works include medical illustrations, pornography, military imagery, and pop cultural perversions to address “the abject pleasures of Asiatic womanhood as produced through the sexual economies of war, immigration, and marriage,” as Liu describes the work’s intent. Liu continues, “In suturing together these grotesqueries of history, Zhang holds a funhouse mirror to the narratives of romance, rescue, and redemption that violently regulate Asian women in the United States empire.” Maria Quinata reviews Citizens of Photography: The Camera and the Political Imagination, edited by Christopher Pinney with the PhotoDemos Collective. This new collection of essays looks at popular uses of photography in regions with a history of conflict including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Greece, India, Nepal, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Quinata notes that the ideas of Ariella Azoulay’s Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography “[loom] large throughout each chapter, reinforcing how significant her work is for scholars currently grappling with the relationship between photographic practices and political representation” and concludes that Citizens of Photography “offers a thought-provoking and convincing argument for how everyday photographic practices utilized by ‘the people’ have profound political effects.” Alisia Grace Chase reviews Track Changes: A Handbook for Art Criticism, edited by Mira Dayal and Josephine Heston. Chase reveals where she finds that this “predominately feminist” and “rigorously honest” text, with its amplified calls for collectivity, falls short while praising the book for its notable “candor…regarding tacit cultural expectations of solidarity.” * * *As always, we welcome submissions of scholarly articles intended for peer review, as well as reports on events and happenings (in person and virtual); essays; photo essays; interviews with artists, curators, writers, and theorists; and exhibition, book, film, video, event, and project reviews. We cover photography, film and video, new media, book arts, the analog and the digital. We publish dossiers and accept proposals for guest-edited issues as well. Please see “Submit” on our website for more information or inquire about guidelines.We at Afterimage wish you a pleasant spring season.

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