Based at Colby College, the Photography and Migration Project brings together scholars, artists, students, and the central Maine community to reflect on the relationship between photography and migration. We invite you to explore this website, which highlights the components of the project, including a research seminar and academic conference, exhibitions, photo contests, film screenings, and community events. Learn more about the Project’s events in spring 2017 and the 2018 edited volume, Photography and Migration.

Throughout its history, the photographic medium has played an important role in the movement of people, objects, identities, and ideas across time and space, especially in the human crossing of geographical and cultural borders. Cameras documented, enabled, or controlled such forced or voluntary movements, while photographers attempted to put a face on immigration around the world, making visible its associations with transition, displacement, hardship, and opportunity. Some of the questions the Project considers are: What does it mean to represent photographically the experiences of (im)mobility, exile, diaspora, and border crossing? How do photographs themselves migrate across local, regional, national, and global contexts?

The Photography and Migration Project was founded in the fall of 2014 by Tanya Sheehan, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor, Department of Art, Colby College, tsheehan [at] colby [dot] edu.