A Political Uncanny: The Homelessness of Photographs

Abstract

Since its inception, photography has been a hybrid technology: extending the thread of the doubleness of photography, this book explores photography’s uncanniness especially focusing on its representation of home as a troubled, threatened, lost, or melancholy space and place. The photograph as a space that has no place, that complicates location in space-time, lends itself to modernity’s troubled patterns of rootlessness, homelessness, and displacement. I interrogate ways that the development of photography as a technology coincides with cultural shifts and traumas of the early nineteenth century in the West, extending this meditation through interpretation of images that exemplify a photographic uncanny. The book considers twenty-first century responses to the haunted condition of postcolonial societies, and the photography that as a technology is our lingua franca, investigating the works of Bear Allison (Eastern Band Cherokee), Shelley Niro (Mohawk, Turtle Clan), and Devin Allen. In the introduction, I define the uncanny, discuss the history of the term, and argue for its application to photography.