Photographing the visible/invisible
The question of the location of borders has been a big one in recent years - not only in political terms, but also in intellectual terms: what it is that makes a border appear to actually be a border is not that obvious. In terms of the landscape, seascape or air, borders are often not very visible, except in small areas around official border crossing points. Yet people know they are there: sometimes, they make themselves more present in cities and the places where undocumented workers congregate than they do at the geographical areas where borders exist. At other times, something that ought to be on one or other side of a border in fact turns out to be an enclave, somewhere where the rules of the border do not quite apply.
There have been many debates about whether borders should be properly seen as lines, points, fronts, frontiers, marches, etc; there have also been attempts to radicalise our understanding of borders - by, for example, drawing maps differently (see, for example, the MigMap website). In any case, what can be seen of borders, what can be visualised as 'borderli-ness' has clearly become very important. So this part of the COST project aims to use a professional photographer to visit a range of the research sites of the participants in this project, generating a wide range of images of the eastern periphery of Europe, to provide a multiple sense of what counts as 'border'.
Photos from the EastBordNet photography project can be viewed at the Photo Gallery.
August 2007; weekly bazaar in Ayvalik, Turkey. Photos: Lena Malm.
Photos are the copyright of Lena Malm.