Craig Campbell is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas (Austin). I am fascinated with the way that making things, curating exhibitions, and organizing workshops can function as devices for thinking. I am committed to experimenting with and theorizing modes of description and evocation. Current projects include the cultural history of an unbuilt hydro-electric dam in Central Siberia, the weird time of a shadow, and the aesthetics of damaged, degraded, and manipulated photographs.  I am also involved in an initiative called Writing with Light, which explores photography and photo essay s in cultural anthropology.

Vivian Choi is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology; RACE program advisor. My research focuses on the political, environmental, and technological dimensions of disasters. My current book project, entitled Disaster Nationalism: Tsunami and Civil War in Sri Lanka, examines the intersections of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the decades-long civil war which ended in 2009 in Sri Lanka. I am currently developing a new project on climate change and sea surface warming - a slow-moving disaster - in the Indian Ocean. I am also affiliate faculty in Race and Ethnic Studies and Environmental Studies.

Lee Douglas is a visual anthropologist, curator, and image-maker who is currently a Marie Skłowdowska Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History (IHC) at NOVA University in Lisbon. Combining scholarly research, media production, and curatorial practice, her work examines how the past is reconstructed and the future reimagined through engagements with the remnants of political violence and social change in the Iberian Atlantic. Currently, she is the Head Researcher for the project “Militant Imaginaries, Colonial Memories” which analyzes individual and collective uses of the material and visual traces left by entangled historical events: the Carnation Revolution, the end of empire, and the return of Portuguese colonial settlers to the metropole. Prior to this, she was a lecturer of anthropology and visual culture at New York University-Madrid and a Research Fellow in the Collections Department at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. 

Arjun Shankar is an Assistant Professor, Georgetown University. Dr. Shankar is an anthropologist, critical pedagogue, and mediamaker whose work falls into three broad areas. First, he is concerned with the politics of help and its role in upholding systems of racial capitalism. In his current book project, Brown Saviors and their Others, he takes India's burgeoning help economy, specifically the education NGO sector, as a site from which to interrogate these ideas. He shows how colonial, racial, and caste formations undergird how transnational and digitized NGO work is done in India today. Second, he is a visual anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker who has been interested in developing decolonial, participatory visual methodologies. He has primarily focused on the neocolonial politics of representation, global circulation, and reception of the "impoverished" and "suffering" child figure and offer new multimodal methods as alternatives to these paradigms. He is also interested in multimodal evaluation and publishing, asking questions regarding the possibilities that might accompany non-textual knowledge production. Towards this end, he is a current editor with the multimodal section of American Anthropologist. Finally, he is an advocate for Curiosity Studies (with Perry Zurn), an emerging interdisciplinary field which challenges us to think anew about scholarly production, pedagogic praxis, and the political role of the academician. Arjun asks: what might a radical curiosity make possible and what political, economic, and social constraints prevent the flourishing of curiosity?

Mark R. Westmoreland coordinates the Visual Ethnography master specialisation at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of Leiden University. He previously served as editor of Visual Anthropology Review and now spearheads the Writing with Light curatorial collective for ethnographic photoessays. Prior to joining Leiden University, he taught at the University of Texas at Austin, the American University in Cairo, and Stockholm University. He is an award-winning filmmaker and has published widely in both scholarly journals and art catalogues.

Alejandro M. Flores Aguilar holds a Diplom soziologe (sociology) degree from the Freie Universität Berlin and a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a postdoctoral fellow in the CSMCH-IASH, at the University of Edinburgh. His current project—Raised Gaze in Ixil Time: Towards a Minor History of War—revolves around the production of an ethnographic film-essay, and a hypertextual, multimedia memorial repertoire composed of video portraits—life stories of Maya-Ixil former guerrillas. This project has been supported by the Wenner-Gren’s Fejos Postdoc in Ethnographic Film. His research interests include transdisciplinary, decolonial, collaborative research methods, sensorial and visual anthropology of memory, social imaginaries, Cold War, counterinsurgency infrastructures, and indigenous—ontological—subversions. 

Álvaro Minguito Palomares is an economist, anthropologist, and documentary photographer. He is the Photo Coordinator for the Madrid-based periodical El Salto, the Graphic Editor for La Marea, and an instructor in the Photojournalism program at the University of Castilla la Mancha (UCLM). His photographic work has been showcased in numerous national and international publications, including El País, eldiario.es, Anthropology Now, NatGeo, and narrative.ly. Combining political activism and documentary photography, Minguito has participated in multiple activist collectives, including Quieres Callarte (2006-2009) and the Colectivo Novecento (2011-2014). He is active in Madrid-based social movements and was a founding member of the DISOPress Agency, a response to calls for alternative models for photojournalistic work that emerged during the “15M” movement in May 2011. 

Clemente Bernad studied Fine Arts at Universidad Central de Barcelona  and Sociology at the Public University of Navarra. He has been working as a documentary photographer since 1986. His work focuses on social and political issues in the cultural contexts he inhabits. His photographic work includes the projects “Jornaleros,” “Pobres de nosotros,” “El sueño de Malika,” and “Basque Chronicles,” which documents the political conflict in Euskal Herria. Donde habita el recuerdo is a photo-book that is part of his broader oeuvre on historical memory struggles and mass grave exhumations in Spain. Together with Carolina Martínez, Bernad is the co-founder of the editorial project Alkibla, which publishes independent documentary work in Spain. At present, he is working on documentary projects that examine contemporary sociopolitical issues and works as an independent image-maker. 

Gustavo Germano is a photographer, who between 1990 and 2001, Germano worked as a reporter, served as the graphic editor for Entre Ríos Media in Argentina, and published his documentary work in newspapers and magazines in Buenos Aires. He began his artistic career in 2007 with the exhibition Ausencias, which focused on the victims of forced disappearance during Argentina’s most recent dictatorship (1976-1983). The project was showcased at the Casa Amèrica Catalunya in Barcelona. Since then, he has been working on the creation and development of social and civic memory projects, including Distancias (2009), Ausencias Brasil (2010-2012), y Búsquedas (2015). Together with his current project Contradesaparecido, which documents Germano’s own journey searching for his brother’s remains, this oeuvre maps and makes visible the traces of forced disappearance and political violence across Latin America.

Vanina de Monte is a graphic designer who holds a degree in Visual Communication. She began her professional career in 1998 at the Toscano Diseño studio in Paraná (Entre Ríos, Argentina). She was also a teaching assistant and the Head of Practical Studies in ‘Typography’ and ‘Expressive Media’ at the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urbanism at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral in Santa Fe, Argentina. In 2001, she moved to Barcelona where she was a member of the Design Departments at the R&W and Loop Comunicación agencies. Between 2008 and 2019 she acted as the Art Director at the John Doe agency and, since 2007, she has worked in collaboration with photographer Gustavo Germano.

Jordana Blejmar is Lecturer in Visual Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Liverpool. She is the author of Playful Memories: The Autofictional Turn in Post-Dictatorship Argentina (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and co-editor of three books on politics, memory, and arts in Latin America. She is Assistant Editor of the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies and the Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded project “Cold War Toys: Material Cultures of Childhood in Argentina” (2022-2024). 

Natalia Fortuny is a Lecturer in Latin American Visual Arts and Photography at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and Conicet. She teaches two Masters degrees at UBA and UNGS. She was awarded her PhD in Social Sciences from the Universidad of Buenos Aires and has a masters degree in History of Argentine and Latin American Art from IDAES-UNSAM. Her current research focuses on photography, memory and political violence. Since 2016 she has coordinated FoCo, a research group in Contemporary Photography, Arts and Politics at the Instituto Gino Germani (UBA). In 2014, she published Memorias fotográficas. Imagen y dictadura en la fotografía argentina contemporánea (La Luminosa, 2014, available here).

Check out the review of Writing with Light by the Society for Cultural Anthropology (February 9, 2023)
https://culanth.org/fieldsights/the-photo-essays-bark

Writing with Light Magazine is an illustrated visual anthropology periodical. The core aim of the magazine is to support and develop a photo essay form that takes seriously the contribution of design to the production of creative and scholarly knowledge.

The Writing with Light collective is comprised of leading scholars in the field of Visual Anthropology. Our five-member collective was originally formed nearly ten years ago to curate and edit the photo essay section of the journal Cultural Anthropology. This was an initiative that was jointly supported with the Society for Visual Anthropology. In 2015 we received a grant from the Wenner-Gren foundation to hold a workshop on the subject of the photo essay. It was in that workshop that we first conceived of the Writing with Light magazine.

Writing with Light Magazine is a design-oriented, hybrid print and digital large format publication. Our inaugural issue is nearing completion and will be printed in November 2021. The goal is to publish a single issue annually. Our magazine features extended photo essays where each photographer is given space to elaborate their research through dynamic combinations of image and text developed in collaboration with design-editors. Select photo essays are vetted by a robust peer-review process.

The process we call print-forward design has grown out of our experience of editing photo essays for websites. Not only were these disastrously ephemeral (disappearing altogether from the internet if the provider no longer supports the publication) but they were subject to transformation at the whim of programmers and UX designers. Limitations we faced included simple serial slide-show like displays that differed from screen to screen, device to device, and year to year. Various disappointments led us to abandon design that was subordinated to vagaries of software. We chose instead to design with the intention of publishing a short-run print magazine that would benefit from digital distribution as a free PDF. The PDF format ensures that our design decisions are ‘locked down’ as the magazine circulates and is copied and shared from one device to another. For inspiration we looked to the illustrated print magazines like Life, VU, AIZ, USSR in construction, and others. These large format magazines featured photography and put images and text into wide-circulation. It was in these magazines that the photo essay enjoyed a kind of golden-age. The unique mixture of writing, photographs, and design-layout put a dramatically novel form of knowledge production into the hands of millions upon millions of people around the world. While most large-format mass circulation photographic magazines disappeared by the 1960s we believe the form of the photo essay continues to offer a unique possibility for critically creative expression.

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