Hooded Matters: Subversive Practices of Representation in the Age of Surveillance

This article examines how photography, historically used by the colonial apparatus, has been appropriated as a tool of resistance that can reinscribe image-making as an anticolonial practice. In particular, it focuses on how new facial recognition technologies have altered photographic aesthetics and practices. The analysis seeks to observe the photographic phenomenon from multiple perspectives (photographer, photographed subject, audiences and the behaviour of the networked image), taking into account not only the frozen event but all the relations established in photographic making. The critical analysis also considers how photography can become a vehicle for state censorship and persecution, leaving behind its historical social function of documentation and denunciation.