In a world of increasing mobilities – driven by leisure or dislocation, by desires for ‘cultural’ self-enrichment or sheer survival – the “conquest of the world as picture” that Martin Heidegger astutely noted, effects the destination of those on the move as well as what they ‘see’ when they get there. Even more so, the world becomes stages, especially if the place one wishes to be is nowhere nearby. As John Urry notes, sites became sights: Mom and Dad in front of the new house; wild Aunt Mildred at the Taj Mahal! Me in the USA! (v.)

Our appetite for backdrops remains just as ferocious and just as fiercely hegemonic. Professionals and hobbyists alike simply pan their cameras until the backdrop places the subjects there. All that lies outside is unphotographed and therefore unseen, unseeable and unknowable. For the proper trophy shot, all that is made undesirable or is thought to reflect poorly upon those being photographed must be exorcized from the picture and eventually from memory and history. Such erasures are at the core of banal, everyday operations of power.

In There There we investigate the distance between the there and there identified by Stein’s disrupted imagination. The images we show are part of a growing collection of photographs created since late 2003. Tracking our own movements from ‘home’ to cities where our work takes us, we have hired studio photographers to picture us in front of their most popular backdrops. In turn, we photograph the photographers photographing us, and their studios.

Hiring only those we can reasonably afford, we find that in contemporary North America, many studio photographers are situated upon the same rung of the racialized ladder as we are. Most of us are more or less recent migrants from outside of the centers of world power. Backdrops of the good life mediate our encounters. Perhaps this is the reason that the photographers we meet cater mostly to a ‘local’ clientele, those for whom this ‘good life’ is not readily experienced.

Gaye Chan + Nandita Sharma