Lens distortion: image capture, racism and subversion from colonial photography to the iborder

Abstract

This intervention emerged from the increase of use of facial recognition technologies on population management, specifically on European migration management. Inspired by these circumstances I reflect over the use of optical lens from the early use of the camera by Europeans in colonial times in connection to contemporary image capture devices as a tracking tool to detecting and encamp people on the move. I believe that this archaeological methodology with an aesthetic sensibility allows to reveal how contemporary disciplinary techniques of image capture are produced by a complex relation of power and knowledge framed within the same biometric logic of truth-seeking that marked the European colonial domination. I conclude my intervention by featuring a powerful artwork of a contemporary artist that with her artwork disrupts the illusory claim of scientific truth and impartiality that still nowadays colonizes the system of visual verification, by upsetting its cluster of relations of power, by evoking forgotten African roots of modernity.