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Machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence have made photographic manipulation easy and seamless. In thinking about the ways in which artificial intelligence has altered the truth-value of photography, this article explores the importance of situating the current debates over fake news and photographic manipulation in a larger historical context. More specifically, it suggests that it is equally important to understand both the inner workings of artificial intelligence as well as the foundations of indexicality that warrant the truth-value of both analog film and video. In the era of analog flexible film then, the negative was often seen as a source of truth, whereas the positive was understood as being manipulatable and manipulated. In the age of digital photography, the idea of a digital negative has come to articulate yet another attempt to anchor the visual in a regime of truth. RAW formats are now seen as comparable to an analog negative. These RAW formats are developed in an Adobe software application called Lightroom rather than in a physical darkroom which facilitated the making of an analog positive image out of an analog negative. The article concludes with an appeal for the importance of teaching both current and obsolete methods of media making in order to foster critical visual literacy and argues that the darkroom has become yet again a crucial place for rediscovering the power of photography to expose both its authenticity and its malleability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I analyze the 2007 mapping and walling of Baghdad's neighborhoods into 'gated communities' and 'ghettos' as a way of distinguishing and segregating Sunni and Shia 'friends and 'foes'. This walling was part of the Iraq War (2003-2010) in which a US-led military coalition invaded the state and framed its occupation as a project aimed to reconstruct Iraq into a modern democratic state. I situate this walling project within Foucault's notion of gridding space, and argue that it exemplifies the materialization of the cell technique, and Carl Schmitt's articulation of three modes of empty space in relation to territory. I argue that the walling process was an attempt to produce what I call a "continuous security", predicated upon the assumption of a population's characterized belonging to the circumnavigated territory. On the outskirts of the walls, however, the security measures remained to be discontinuous - risk here was high as the space was inhabited by a heterogeneous milieu. The outskirts, on the other hand, can be articulated as spaces of discontinuous security where "place-based" global sovereignty and uneven networks of places have come to characterize population. The imposition of the disciplinary mechanism of walling was met with resistance and had a disastrous impact on the life of Baghdad's residents, as shown by Haifa Zagnana (2010) and soon was abandoned both by the US military and by the Iraqi government of that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Culture in-colour is a concept that recognizes that culture is always imbricated in relations of colour as form, structure, or system and in relations of colours. These two regimes – colour and colours – fold back onto and interpenetrate one another to constitute culture in complex, multiple, contradictory, constitutive relations that are potentially open to change. Theorizing culture in-colour draws on and beyond the image of the cyborg to insist on in-colour as neither a thing, a property of an object, nor a neurological process, but an active verb, a lived event: of interminglings and articulations, of repetitions, struggles, rearticulations, and becomings. The Dress, a 2015 controversy over the colour of a dress in an image circulated over the Internet, reveals how colour is typically thought of – as surface, artifice, and ornament; as a scientific fact; and as a neurological phenomenon – and how it is lived affectively. The anxieties produced by The Dress suggest a tension between the typical explanations of how colour matters and the less-accessible, but far more consequential, ways that both colour and colours matter. Colour and colours are often used to designate community belonging, but a closer look at the perceived threat in seeing colour differently reveals an underlying trust both in what colour is and in the reliability of colour to negotiate/constitute community in relations of inclusion, exclusion, and hierarchy. Neuroscientific and technological explanations affectively discipline colour by asserting thingness and sameness, and by erasing the traces of the powerful articulatory work of colour. Yet it is the system of colour itself that makes the dismissal of the significance of colour possible. Acknowledging that we live in-colour demands recognition that not only do we live deeply in-colour, but that different cultures in-colour are possible, that different forms or systems of colour are lived affectively, and that the disciplining of colour can be resisted with effects more open to indeterminateness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Luigi Fiorillo's Album Souvenir d'Alexandrie: Ruines 1882 documented the bombardment and looting of Alexandria, Egypt on July 11-13, 1882. The album is preoccupied with the architectural, rather than the human face of devastation: buildings were ruined rather than lives. Its images bring in focus the destruction caused to the modern buildings by the fires of the Arab looters and blur out the death toll the British invasion has had on the residents of the city. While the album focused predominantly on the wrecked buildings, it also included images of dead Egyptians. In a photograph titled Les batteries de Rasel-Tin démantelées we see the bodies of three dead Egyptian men - one of these bodies has been intentionally blurred out during the photographic development process. Depictions of human death complicate the idea of ruin. Building upon the articulation of rubble by Walter Benjamin and the concept of necropolitcs as theorized by Achille Mbembe, I posit here that visual representations of human death toll resist the articulation of destruction as ruin and speak to its conceptual presence as rubble. It is through an articulation of the ruin as rubble that historiography can begin to illuminate significance and severity of political violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the mobilization of humanitarian aid after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 by various volunteers and aid groups. Information is provided on the role that universal humanism and identity politics play in the wake of crisis. A discussion of how genderless symbols are most often used to represent both the diversity of aid workers and the commonality of those in need is offered. The Common Ground Collective (CG) is noted, including its establishment as a New Orleans, Louisiana, community-run organization that helped victims during the aftermath of the hurricane.