Empathic Projections: Visual Anthropology Design and Acknowledgement

Abstract

Averting or embracing our capacity for acknowledgement results from what we are willing to take-in what there is to see. In this sense, the photo essay in general confronts us with the limits of our capacities. This essay attempts to examine how it is that the photo essay and its design contend with imagination and acknowledgment. Considering recent editorial initiatives and a redesign of Visual Anthropology Review, and, in greater depth, Feldman and Pérez’s photo essay “Living at the LUX: Homelessness and improvisational waiting under COVID-19,” this essay asks: How does the photo essay—and relatedly, the photograph—in its looks face the possibility of a resistance to acknowledge the reality it depicts?