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Although this exhibition was originally intended to be physically mounted at the Wallach Gallery, we find ourselves today in a strange moment, eerily reminiscent of the times when the passport system was initially written into international law. Borders have been closed. Fears of strangers have risen. Social stratifications have intensified. It is my hope that launching this exhibition virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic will allow individuals to experience the themes addressed in Reframing the Passport Photo in a more personal way. How will the world respond to the current crisis? What will be the consequences?
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Reframing the Passport Photo uses the passport as a lens through which to view contemporary issues associated with the globalized world: migration, nationalism, access, belonging, and personhood. Showing four artists whose work references the passport photo—Martina Bacigalupo, Tomoko Sawada, Stephanie Syjuco, and Sheng Qi—the exhibition explores the premises that underlie modern identification practices, exposing the growing gaps between personal identity and state-sanctioned identification. Together, the works shed light on the assumptions embedded within the international passport system and the social stratifications they perpetuate.
The artists engage with the passport photo’s formal components—an isolated and emotionless face gazing straight ahead, like its predecessor, the mug shot. They question the centrality of the face to both personal identity and its bureaucratic expression; the face functions doubly as a site for individual recognition, where memory and emotional expression are central, and collective registration, where race and sex (and the theories of physiognomy that underlie them) are primary concerns. By altering the face’s features, obscuring it, or removing it altogether, the artists consider the power of the face and the meanings attributed to it.
Focusing on the documents that produce, regulate, and monitor international systems of movement and passage, the artists presented in Reframing the Passport Photo illuminate the effects that these documents have on both the individual and societal levels. Historian Craig Robertson poses the fitting question, “How was it that a piece of paper . . . came to be accepted as a reliable answer to the question ‘Who are you?”’
The works on view are a select portion of photographs taken by Obal Denis at a photography studio in Gulu, Uganda. In each photograph, the subject’s face has been cut out and used for passport applications, as well as applications for scholarships, bank accounts, and loans from nongovernmental organizations. It was too costly for many people to use the standard ID photo machine that produces four passport-size photos automatically, so Denis took full-body portraits, cut out the faces, and discarded the remaining portions.
Martina Bacigalupo discovered the discarded images in 2011 at Denis’s studio and received his permission to exhibit them. With the heads neatly removed and sent on their way elsewhere, only the bodies of the applicants remain. The individuals in the photos, despite being faceless, communicate their individuality through hand gestures, clothing, and postures. The formal components of identification photos are here subverted; without faces, we still get a sense of who these people are. In the Gulu Real Art Studio series, personal identity is literally at odds with state-sanctioned identification―while the two overlap conceptually, here they are physically separate.
For this work, Tomoko Sawada posed one hundred times in an instant photo machine, altering her hair, accessories, expressions, clothing, and makeup each time. In performing many different identities for the camera, Sawada highlights the malleability of identity and calls into question concepts of selfhood and individuality―ideas that are central to identification photography and forms of state-sanctioned representation. Sawada’s serial presentation of the images renders the many characters anonymous. Although documenting identity is the highest priority of a passport image, this does not translate when the photos are shown in large numbers. Faces become lost in a sea of similar and dissimilar features; the focus shifts from who a person is to what type of person they are. Sawada’s work gives rise to a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between hypervisibility and invisibility. In this work, identity and anonymity exist alongside one another.
In this series, Stephanie Syjuco obscures her face with “ethnic” patterned textiles that, in reality, come from American retail stores―in the images, clothing tags are comically visible. She poses several times and turns her body slightly left, right, and fully forward, recalling the minor shifts in the passport photo’s strict guidelines that vary from one country to the next. While these images depict multiple “applicants” who sit for their passport photos hoping for permission to immigrate, Syjuco is the subject in each work. Masking herself from view in each image, she begs the question “Do you see me?” Appropriating the formal components of the passport photo grid, Syjuco’s series speaks to the facelessness of the identification process, looking specifically at how cultural, national, and religious symbols prevent people from being seen as individuals.
In these works, Sheng Qi photographs his disfigured hand holding passport-style photographs of himself and of his mother. Sheng amputated his own finger in protest after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. The flesh of Sheng’s hand, shown in color, feels immediate, while the passport photos are confined to a time “before.” Of course, passport photos are always “before” pictures—taken before a move away from home, or a visit somewhere. They are not equipped to represent the changes that travel elicits; there is no room for growth in official identification. For Sheng, his identity lies in absence—in the part of his body that is missing, shaped by the loss and betrayal of Chinese government action. Through stark contrasts between past and present, presence and absence, color and black and white, Sheng emphasizes the discrepancy between personal identity and state-sanctioned representation.