Introduction: A Photograph Is a School, Dispersed

When I first began paper cameras press in 2020, I had a dream to build a school for photography. [1] But over time, I realized the activities I, along with cherished collaborators, had been developing were less about producing new photos and more about learning from the many photos that already exist.

We have been living with photography for over two centuries, [2] and in that time, the role of photographs, like language, have seeped into many parts of our lives. Photographs are a pervasive and sticky matter. In the first paper cameras publication, Camera of Possibilities: A Workbook for a Carrier Bag Theory of Photography, co-authors Mira Dayal and beck haberstroh beautifully summarize the stickiness of photographs:

We carry photos and we are carried by photos. Those that carry us—our likeness, our data, our identities—might be digital files in our phones, on computers, in the data center of a social media company, or on institutional hard drives. The images we carry could be pieces of paper in our wallets, picture frames, or scrapbooks, maybe on a wall or shelf, under a bed, in a landfill. [3]

Far from being neutral records, photographs are artifacts of the ecology(ies) of our observations. Every photograph carries, and is carried by, multiple relationships: by people who make the photo, by the captions that recount the photo, by the archives that store the photo, and by those of us who continue to look at and share the photo. [4] When we study photographs, we learn different ways photographers and the subjects they’ve photographed have translated the energy of social encounters into a visible record: with blur, with precision, fast, slow, with love, with coercion. And when we study the lifecycle of a photograph, from its creation to its circulation, we learn about the larger conditions that may have made the images we face possible: access to a specific material or technology, a community’s trust in a photo studio, an aesthetic lineage of steadfast resistance, or state-manufactured biases.

Growing up, I found home in learning about the many questions photographers and scholars have asked, and continue to ask, of this complex medium. But I also struggled with how to carry these ideas forward—to photos, with my communities, with students—without feeling like I was over-intellectualizing the dense life that happens in and around any given photograph, especially with photographs that carry, or are carried by, deeply painful histories of unwilling exchange and imposition. Like photography, interpretation can sometimes, and has often, produce(d) another gesture of control. [5] These hesitations inspired me to translate photography and critical theory into cards that I, and collaborators/students, could place atop—but never affix to—an image, allowing us to feel our way through language while acknowledging the life in a photograph that will always elude the camera’s capture as well as our interpretive grasp. [6] These cards would become the Paper Cameras Study Pack—a deck of cards that translate a range of critical frameworks, recent scholarship, and photographic practices into a set of tactile learning tools that invite you to slowly study one photograph at a time and unpack the relationships that comprise it.

I worked on the deck as a way to feel through (some of the many) power relations that mobilize photographs and the shapes of imagination they make in our world. Photographs have given us a material for memorializing our lives and those of our elders. They have given us ad-hoc stages for people to rehearse visibility and transform themselves on their own terms. These practices of wielding the power of photographs to serve community and sustain life constitute what the deck refers to as “loving observation” and “self-determined documentation.” Conversely, photographs have also played a crucial role in facilitating systemic oppression and interpersonal harm. With photographs’ tendency to be considered a neutral index, [7] photos have been instrumentalized to attempt to control populations and system-wide narratives, while the increasing speed with which we take and consume photographs naturalizes the dangerous notion that we are entitled to access any-one person, community, thing, world. [8] These practices of abusing the power of the photograph to uphold relations of domination and sustain harm constitute what the deck refers to as “extractive capture.” 

Of course, any photograph each of us might study is a record of a time that has irrevocably preceded our moment of encounter. No amount of careful looking can change the love or harm that may have already occurred within a specific photographic event. That said, the photograph may be yielded from larger conditions or relationships that are still operative, or can be reproduced, in the present. [9] And whether we realize it or not, when we view images we play a part in those larger relationships: we might share an image widely or intimately, re-caption it with more or less information than how we found it, continue to carry (or refute) the ideologies or biases that are integral to the photo’s origins, or go on to make similar photos ourselves. [10] The Paper Cameras Study Pack frames study as an invitation to slowly look at photographs and  reflect on the impact of our views. [11] In this way, the Paper Cameras Study Pack likens the study of a photograph to the shape of a nimble school, made with the photos of our lives, and dispersed to the many places where we already find and look at photographs: with our loved ones, in our classrooms, on our phones, in the streets. As we attend the small school made from a photograph, how can we momentarily halt the unflinching speed of image production, [12] and consider how to practice more loving observation and less extractive capture in how we participate in the varying relationships that make images?

This study pack aims to facilitate understanding, but also intends to support our capacity for ambiguity. It invites you to dwell inside of these shared questions and arrive at your own. Thus, in many ways, this deck is necessarily incomplete: it must be shared with you and the schools you’ll make from the photos of your lives. [13]

Close Looking Exercise

When I first created the study deck, I struggled with sharing example photographs, because I didn’t want to predetermine the kinds of photos you may choose and, by extension, the outcomes of the exercise. But as I prepare to share this deck with publics more broadly, I am realizing, with much thanks to trusted peers, it feels important to share more about the photographs I personally study to provide more of a ground from which this deck emerges. [14]

There are two photographs I have been wrestling with for many years. In fact, the complexities I find in these photographs have informed the questions I ask of photography, which in turn have shaped the tactile props for close looking I long sought to materialize.

So, welcome to the rooms we’ll make as I attempt to slowly share these photographs with you, pulling select cards from the Paper Cameras Study Pack. [15]

The Paper Cameras Study Pack contains three card types, loosely intended to be shared in the following sequence:

1. Definition Cards: these cards introduce the language and theories on which this deck operates.

2. Notice Cards: offer questions for developing observations. They may feel expansive: inviting you to zoom in and consider many possible stories and dynamics of your photograph.

3. Discern Cards: offers language for tethering your observations to relationships of, within, and beyond photography. They may feel tightening: inviting you to zoom out and consider the broader relations of power and social and political contexts of your photograph.

I see a group of at least fourteen people holding massive rugs that hang over the edge of an archway on which the group is standing. They are some of the most beautiful rugs I have ever seen. 

The largest among the textile pieces appears to be closest to the camera; as it hangs, the rug seems to nearly touch the ground. I am guessing this particular rug is heavy because there are many hands holding it. In suspension, the rug almost looks like a curtain for a theater or a backdrop in a photo studio, but the performance we anticipate is one of display. 

The loudest sound may be the camera’s shutter, but the thickest sound may be that of the many hands clasping a material heavier than their bodies.

The photographer seems to be on the ground, angling their camera up toward the rug, toward the group that holds it. In the bottom right of the photograph, I see details of a transportation vehicle—a hood, a bulb, the top of a wheel. It may belong to the photographer, cueing that they may be a visitor—someone external to the community holding the carpet.

I move the viewfinders across the people. I do know that this photograph is from an orphanage located in Ghazir, a municipality in (then) Syria, where young Armenians displaced from the ongoing Armenian Genocide lived. [16] I also know that the orphanage was funded by the American Near East Relief project, [17] and that, with American influence, it became a rug factory and vocational school in which the young Armenains were “trained” on a skill already deeply embedded in their cultural bodies of knowledge: weaving. I hold this context, and return to look at the hands that hold the massive textile, the hands that hold so that the rug can be seen by gravity’s pull. 

I imagine various ways in which the performance of the rug’s display closes, but each bears a different mode of labor with a different relationship to the gravity of exposure. I imagine the group readjusting their grip as they collectively pull the rug up and back. Becoming a coordinated pulley as they seek to carefully fold the rug away until its next exhibition. But, I can also imagine that the group might immediately let fall the material, dropping the rugs to collapse in the photo’s foreground in an uncoordinated release as they refuse the maintenance of display. 

I cannot remember where I first found this photograph. I believe it was in some corner of the internet, while I was researching photographs of Armenian cultural production. While trying to re-trace my original encounter with this photograph, I came across the book President Calvin Coolidge and the Armenian Orphan Rug, written by Dr. Hagop Martin Deranian. Combing through the publication, I couldn’t find the same photograph I originally encountered, but I did find one most likely taken seconds before or after, revealing a closer image of the people holding the rug and the gorgeous details that comprise it. An image of a handwritten caption, most likely inscribed on the back of the photograph, appears in the book. The caption is written in German, but I can make out the word and date “Washington, 1925.” 

Deranian’s book details more information about the photograph, revealing that it was taken “prior to [the rug’s] shipping to the United States to President Calvin Coolidge.” [18] The book also reveals an inscription on the reverse side of the rug: “Made by Armenian girls in the Ghazir, Syria, orphanage of the Near East Relief and presented as a Golden Rule token of appreciation to President Coolidge.” [19] Further in the book, I learn that “four hundred girls, working in turns, spent many months on [the rug’s] completion.” [20]

The circulation of the photograph (and all the photographs like it from this day) in many ways mirrors that of the rug itself: both emerged from the labor of Armenian hands, and both were choreographed for the eyes of the capital of the United States.  

There is matter in this picture that wants to tell a story of statist benevolence. The photograph of the young Armenians holding the rug was intended as a thank you gift; like the rug itself, the photo is for Washington because of what Washington had done for the Armenian community. But these for’s feel so much more bloated when in the context of the of, specifically when I return to the group’s grip onto the massive carpet, with knots of their own making. 

As a person of the Armenian diaspora, I often look for photographs of Armenian cultural practices as I long to better understand our lifeways. But ongoing attempts to annihilate the Armenian people and cultural practices means that, more often than not, the photographs of cultural production I encounter are also embedded within a framework of violence. [21]

I hesitate to share this photo because I hesitate to make those in the photo do more work than they have already done—to hold out the carpet one more time, while I retell a story they may not want to be repeated, while I risk the imposition of recuperation from a brutality I have not lived. I hesitate because I wonder how to both critique the systems that are also part of why my family (and many many more) survived and how I am probably here today, even being able to look at this photograph.

When I first encountered this photograph, I had this selfish instinct to print it small and put it in my pocket. In 2020, during quarantine for the COVID-19 pandemic, some of us from an Armenian collective [22] joined one another remotely from our respective corners of the world and went on a walk, each prompted to carry something in our pockets. I carried this photo and shared it over my blurry Facetime, cupped in my hand. 

As I continued to research the photo of the carpet, I came across this photograph. When I first saw it, my eyes darted to the pointing finger. “There,” “that,” “look”—a gesture that specifies sight and literalizes its direction. The pointing finger can feel like a camera of its own, transforming surrounding life into a grammatical object for purposes of communication and sometimes evaluation and possession. [23]

Returning to Dr. Hagop Martin Deranian’s book, I find this photo stretched and pulled across two pages. I scan the viewfinder over the caption, “President Calvin Coolidge standing on the Armenian Orphan Rug with Dr. John H. Finley, Vice Chairman, Near East Relief.” [24] Later in the book, I learn that the rug is occasionally assessed by appraisers who attest to its growing value. 

As I read this caption acknowledging the rug’s acceptance at the White House, I think of Armenians’ relationship to assimilation in the states more broadly, where they/we have historically experienced an ambivalent proximity to whiteness, and its ascending operation, predicated on an ability to perform a reflection of whiteness and to conceal all else. [25]

I am thinking about the painful betrayal that happens when gratitude—a profound act of love and labor—makes matter that becomes co-opted by statist powers to perform as props for the paternal theater of imperial fields of power. [26]

Though this photograph is of US State actors, I am thinking about how this image, affirmed by the pointing finger, is also still of the rug that is for the US. As I continue to look at the fingers that point-to and the feet that step-on, I am thinking about this photograph as a metaphor for the infrastructure of charity, where aid and relief are given to those living through atrocities without reconfiguring the larger relations of domination that created and maintained the atrocities to begin with. In other words, I am thinking about how charity imposes a social grammar where those receiving relief (the primary of in this group of photographs) are dependent on those in power to provide the relief (the for in this group of photographs). I continue to think about how/if these imposed dependencies means the labor for this particular rug further kept those displaced in a “stabilizing no-whereness.” [27] The time and labor these young Armenians spent crafting this rug could have been diverted to rebuilding their lives on their own terms. But in spite of the rug’s existence, they may have found “loopholes of retreat” in the minutes between their knots, or by the moonlight in their dreams. [28]

As I sprawl the Discern Cards, I see ten cards, organized into three groupings: “extractive capture,” “loving observation,” and “self-determined documentation.”

As I move through the green vellum cards to see what kinds of language may resonate with the photos I have gathered, I initially think about the intentions of the rug as a thank you gift. 

I see a card that reads, “to take for.” [29] In the Discern Card reference booklet, I read that this card pertains to a kind of photographic exchange—a kind of “taking”—that is “built on requests by the photographed person and sustained by acts of sharing that benefit all participants involved in the photo.” The accompanying study pack booklet describes this encounter as a kind of “loving observation.”

I trace the card’s viewfinder over the many “for”s in Dr. Hagop Martin Deranian’s book, a grammar that carries this rug through the language of gift, of offering, of maybe even love. 

Then, I begin to weigh the intentions of the photograph with the impact of the photograph, and I grab a different card. I move the language and viewfinder across both photos, tracing the held carpet on the left—the same carpet that has traveled to be below the feet on the right.

I learn that the green card I am holding pertains to a kind of photographic “taking” that results in a kind of seizing, a kind of theft. “When the photographic encounter transforms the photographed person, people, land and/or context into visual value and seize(s) it for the taker,” reads the card. The Discern Card reference booklet groups this card as a kind of “extractive capture.”

How might the performance of the rug’s offering mask the theft that maintains the dominance of the imperial core? In this case, not a theft of the rug itself, but perhaps a theft of the time, of labor, of four hundred girls weaving a piece that is then “taken” to stage a performance of paternal dependency.

But I don’t want to end the story of the photograph there. I return to the first detail that intrigued me: the hands that grip the rug, featured in the double viewfinders on the left. I remember scholar Tina Campt’s work on listening to images, referenced in the Discern Card reference  booklet, held in my left hand. Though Campt is studying photographs of a different context and positionality than those I face, [30] I learn her lessons and consider the dense scape of bodily autonomy that will always elude the hold of capture. I place a card, a kind the study pack describes as a “self-determined documentation,” atop the weavers’ grip. 

I imagine the ways these weavers may have worked together, looked out for each other, completed each other’s knots, shared in the craft of moving matter along with their hands. As I hold this view over the grip, I wonder how we can re-route the energy of this photo away from the aesthetics of imperial dependency, and toward the life-sustaining choreographies of shared support.

Perhaps I am risking another exposure that is not mine to claim, but this my attempt to listen to the life-force of the four hundred weavers and bear images that yield from trying to listen.

Katie Giritlian has been a book maker and designer since she made her first scrapbook at age eight. Katie is the organizer of paper cameras press, an intimate platform for publishing photography curricula.