terms for pressing with
introduction
paper cameras press, an artist-run publishing project, develops and prints co-authored curricula for studying photography practices and reimagining modalities of capture.
paper cameras press holds photography accountable for the medium’s legacy of extractive capture, while it carries forward practices rooted in loving observation and aspires towards self-determined documentation. Each issue’s curriculum—its lessons, language, and tools—responds to the terms set by its co-authors, while each issue's practice—its printed props and paper cameras—invites readers to set their own scene for study.
paper cameras press logo, depicting four hands touching, arranging, and pressing onto an open sheet of paper as they assemble a book.
paper cameras press is organized by Katie Giritlian and is built while longing for the vibrant SWANA photo studio webs nested in homelands and scattered beyond in diaspora.1 Though paper cameras press produces curricula beyond this cultural and geographic scope, the imagining necessary for the press’s occurrence is inextricable from the possibilities forged by these studios and the pathways established by their cooperative processes.
a letter and a glossary
Dear Reader,
I am so delighted that you are here, reading these words and weighing them against yours, ones you know, or ones you might want instead.
By now you’ve read a little about paper cameras press, but there is a good chance that what you have read so far is not enough to understand (or feel as though you understand) what follows: the blurry attempts at telling the tale of something that makes itself, in secrets and in publics. My hope, but not my expectation, is that together we may yield more tremble than objects, because we will be concerned with finding, and having found, ways to carry the camera for each other.
What follows is a glossary of central terms on which paper cameras press operates: the pieces and practices we seek to hold in place so that we can sustain acts of sharing.
All in one place, the glossary offers a code of conduct, a story of process, a potential history of photography practiced otherwise, a blanket of citations without which this project would simply not exist, and a call for those wishing to gather in these ways.
This glossary is a living document carrying provisional definitions for the purpose of communicating to you, for now, and hopes for continual transformation as the press meets you and others, and changes through this contact.
With love,
Katie
A comprehensive list of the terms can be greeted here.
a
artist-run: when artists [i.e. anyone who imagines beyond the limits of inherited infrastructure] designs, builds, maintains, and loves places made for community.
authors: At its current scale, paper cameras press hosts 2 co-authors and 1 editor for every publication. Beyond these roles, the press operates on fluid participation, attending to the making and working communities at any given moment. While creating a publication, authors assume the responsibility of generating material for publication, being accountable to their own practice, needs, and desires for group work, as well as listening to those of their partner.
c
camera: An instrument that temporarily holds, translates, and offers means to circulate what might become legible as data, a target, a trace, an encounter, or a possibility.
community: For paper cameras press, community is the specific group every publication forms. Community is felt when understanding is built and trust sustained on the terms through which we wish to see, not see, and sense each other. Community may also grow over time, and over the making of multiple publications, but desire to return takes precedence over an expectation to stay.
community agreements: paper cameras press operates on the understanding that both photography and publishing are processes of making known; historically, both mediums have imposed acts of disclosure onto many communities. The camera, and its many mutations, “fabricates consent to be seen.”3 It is with this understanding that we might attend to the acts of ‘making known,’ within the joint projects of photography and publishing, with extensive care. One such example is through the utilization of community agreements between making + working parties.
d
design: paper cameras press supports the possibilities for mutual learning that publishing provides. There is no set or pre-determined designer for any publication; a book may be designed by all or by one. Such is to be determined by the group through co-created agreements and over the course of understanding the publication they wish to share with the world. For example, there may be one person in the group who has plenty of experience with publication design, and another who has limited practice but is eager to learn. While drawing agreements, it might be decided that efficiency is less important than mutual learning, allowing the two to team up to design the issue together. Or, the inverse might occur; they may decide for capacity’s sake that the more experienced designer should carry the work this time, with the agreement that the two schedule time outside of the publication project to skillshare.
e
extractive capture: When the ‘taking’ in “taking pictures” transforms photographic encounters into:
︎sites of control.
︎“to take” = “someone else can’t take”
contexts that assume unlimited visual access and maintain imperialist knowledge formations.4
“to take” = “to be entitled to take”
︎exchanges that, unwillingly, extract value from those photographed while simultaneously facilitating the social production of racial inequities. In other words, exchanges that maintain racial capitalism.
︎“to take” = “to turn whom or what is seen into visual wealth and seize it for the taker”
paper cameras press operates with an understanding that photography’s implication in extractive capture irrevocably facilitates/d ongoing organized violence; paper cameras press holds the medium accountable for these repercussions while it carries forward practices rooted in loving observation and aspiring towards self-determined documentation.
h
hesitate: A pause before, or instead of, production, hesitation is a tremble that disrupts the unflinching momentum of individual photographers championed by the medium’s institutionalization. It may be a fumble, an interruption for thought, or gesture of refusal that blocks an undesired lens from taking; regardless, it is motivated by the gravity of consideration.5
While meeting, ahead of circulating, and before taking a picture, paper cameras press requests that we consider:
our own relationship to the image at hand;
our own social constitutions and the possible privileges or power they may yield;
the consequences of sharing or re-circulating the image;
communicating with communities who have stakes in the image when the image is not of or from our own community;
inquiring within ourselves where we may be intruding when a conversation is not possible.
l
loving observation: When the ‘taking’ in “taking pictures” transforms photographic encounters into:
︎sites of desired witnessing, consensual play, or shared watching motivated by an attempt, with no entitlement, to understand.6
︎“to take” = “to take with”
exchanges built on requests by the photographed person and sustained by acts of sharing.7
︎“to take” = “to take for”
In practice, loving observation may look like two friends working up to the trust required to take a portrait for, and not of, each other—finding and missing each other along the way. It may also look like the conversations forged when a group is huddled around a camera deciding how to photograph a tree to learn from its roots. It may look like the piles of photos communities make for themselves, by themselves, compiled in artist books, zines, performances, or dances. An abundance of gestures constitute possibilities for loving observation.
o
organizer: paper cameras press is a small project organized by Katie Giritlian. Katie’s role, beyond participating in various publication projects as editor or author, can be as involved or not involved as editors and authors desire, with administrative tools and systems ready to share when or if needed.
p
paper camera: Props for seeing and sensing that replace, augment, or disrupt recording technologies, such as cut-outs, string, or choreographed hands. Operating somewhere between story and tool, it offers an instance of potentialized technology (a slippery “what if”), and material for sharing this “what if” with others. It is a minor passage, or a materialized sight that can barely behold before the paper cutout drops, blurs our vision, and reminds us that we cannot hold [that which graces the camera-body] in place.
photography: This press operates on the following definition of photography:
︎an encounter in which multiple protagonists are involved in negotiating acts of making-visible;8
︎this encounter may occur at the site of a camera, at the viewing of a photograph, or at any scene within the photograph’s circulation;
︎in this way, photography is a practice through which we inscribe how we share (and do not share) our world that cannot be reduced to the evidentiary, but is sometimes required of it.
s
self-determined documentation: When the ‘taking’ in “taking pictures” transforms photographic encounters into:
︎acts of refusal in sites of control.9 ︎︎︎
“to take” = null (taking has been refused)
contexts that support the proliferation of autonomous or communally-driven imaging practices.10
“to take” = “so that the taker’s neighbor can also take”
︎exchanges that willingly assign value to the photograph for tracking to a world that is shared.11
“to take” = “to utilize the value generated and seize it for community”
In practice, self-determined documentation may look like stewarding those finding refuge in how to hold a camera for themselves, re-circulating photographs stolen, or photographs that might refer to that which was stolen, with captions that claim otherwise, and many other arrangements. Though these terms are distinct in theory, they are sometimes (if not often) entangled in practice. Someone may take a picture with motivations that resemble loving observation, but with consequences that partly maintain imperial knowledge formations. Though paper cameras press proposes practices as if it were possible to exit from extractive capture, we understand the gravity of extractive forces that affect our world and our capacities to disentangle from them.
endnotes
1. South West Asian + North African. SWANA is an imperfect alternative to the colonial underpinnings of “Middle East.”
2. Though to clarify, assurance is not necessarily the same as in agreement with.
3. Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), 27-8.
4. In her most recent work, Potential History, Azoulay rigorously unpacks the assumptions built into the institutionalization of photography, namely the assumption that photography promised an unlimited window to see any-one person, community, thing, world. Azoulay locates the construction of this assumption in the foundation of imperialist knowledge formations. Put simply: throughout the nineteenth century, cameras continued to advance in precision and speed, and forces of empire understood that this tool offered an opportunity to expedite agendas of expansion and control. In this imperial context, photography’s use proliferated and naturalized the right to unconditional access over a person’s, or community’s, right to refuse that very access.
5. Hesitation is not necessarily slow, though it does excel in slowing down. Hesitation is also what happens when we are in a context where we can hold, and let ourselves be held, by each other. We pause action, tremble as we ask each other for more sensitivity, and learn new registers for embrace.
6. This framework is indebted to the work of consent educators. For more attending: Mia Schachter builds extensive language and somatic tools for identifying and practicing consent, through an anti-binary, trauma-informed, abolitionist approach in Share the Load (2020).
7. This framework is inspired by photographer Hashem El Madani. who built a context of trust in his neighborhood such that residents would ask him to take pictures for them: “Every morning, I would take my camera and walk down the streets of the old city of Saida [Lebanon], where people called me to take photographs of them...I walked through the souks of vegetables, shoemakers, carpenters, and textiles, then went down to the sea castle, the beach, and up until the Land castle. I went as far as the orange fields outside the city walls, the new bridge at Ain el Helweh, the Bargout, Nabi Yahya, and even the Kinayat, the Eucalyptus trees by the river. Everywhere on my way, people asked me to come in and take portraits of their families...” in Mapping Sitting: On Portraiture and Photography (Beirut: Arab Image Foundation, 2002), 839.
8. “Encounter” arrives from scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s labors: “In photography—and this is evident in every single photo—there is something that extends beyond the photographer’s action, and no photographer, even the most gifted, can claim ownership of what appears in the photograph. Every photograph of others bears the traces of the meeting between the photographed persons and the photographer, neither of whom can, on their own, determine how this meeting will be inscribed in the resulting image.”—Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 11; to “make-visible” may also mean to trouble it.
9. In Listening to Images, scholar Tina Campt forges an approach that attends to the quiet acts of refusal transmitted by Black sitters in photographic encounters that were not designed by or for them. For example, in a series of ethnographic portraits, Campt prompts us to consider the body language of the sitters in a state of quivering stasis, rather than immobile stillness. This stasis (this tension, this tremble) points to the dense scape of bodily autonomy that will always elude the shutter.
10. This framework is inspired by the Armenian photography studios and workshops built post-genocide in now-occupied Palestine, in the first half of the twentieth century, and the ways all of these studios worked together to support each other’s efforts amidst ongoing displacement.
11. This framework is indebted to many. It is indebted to abolitionist Sojourner Truth captioning and claiming her photographic image: “I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance.” It is also indebted to the following words transmitted by a Palestinian person demanding the terms of their picture. When faced with a camera, they refused the shutter’s transformation; Anglophonic subtitles translate their declaration as: "I don’t want you to take my picture here—wait until I return to my land—then you can take my picture.” Filmed in 1975, it will most likely have been around twenty-seven years since they were displaced from their homeland (We are the Palestinian People: Revolution Until Victory, newsreel, 1975).
