Image making as a political practice of diagramming

The distance between Govanhill and Sendai is 5624 miles (approx.). Each is subject to forces both local and global that shift and form life in unforeseeable ways. Both areas, for starkly different reasons, have been described as sites of loss and
destruction, sites which require management to draw them back into synch with normative economic regulatory flows. Our work attempts to resist this or at least hold the possibility for a different type of sense, and image making is central to this.
What can images and image making do? Some anthropological images might describe a situation and offer the reader an experience, albeit second hand, of place and/or person. Some capture moments in time – pure documentation. The most effective are those which draw the viewer in, as close to ‘being there’ as possible. Photographs are frequently used as they provide an immediate account. Other images might seek to explain connections between actors and patterns of environmental exchange. It seems to me that none of these accounts for the images and image making practices discussed here. Notwithstanding Jen’s embrace and my skepticism about art as a helpful category we share significant alignments in practice.