Introduction

The papers and visual works presented here were developed from the photographies 3 rd international conference, held between 22-24 September 2022, at the University of Texas at San Antonio's (UTSA) School of Art.Papers selected for the conference were organised into six thematic sessions, taking place over two days, with the title categories of Borders and Boundaries, Transcending Boundaries, Curatorial Perspectives, Borders in Flux, Critical Memory, and Transient Ecologies.These sessions were intended to be performative, to generate discussions between papers and across sessions, and were conceived in the spirit of the very questions we set out to consider: How far and in what ways has photography addressed, help to inform, or undo boundaries and borders.We imagine that readers are all too aware of the structuring function of borders, which are instrumental in defining states, nation-states, and political territories across the world, whether as social spaces, historical, political, and economic entities, or as representational images, with their own aesthetic and ethical dimensions.While borders are often seen as fixed, we also know they are mutable, subject to historical shifts, breaching violence and conflict, and still very much alive around the world today.Russia, for instance, invaded Ukraine in 2014.The current conflict in Gaza with Israel has been raging for years, as in so many other territories and borders across the globe.Boundaries mark the division between things, whether as physical, material, social, or personal spaces, among other conceptions.We might be tempted to say that borders are more solid than boundaries, but perhaps both are equally solid, but can likewise 'melt into air.'Boundaries can be seen in other ways.They form divisions between what is inside and outside.In architecture, for instance, it is the surfaces of a structure that divide.As anthropologists have noted, buildings create divisions between inside and outside spaces, even when portal windows and doors enable us to see or pass from exterior to interior.The large glass plate windows of modernist architecture, for example, sought to abolish the visual boundary between these spaces

Aesthetics · Art · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Latin American and Latino Studies

• Letter K for Kashmir

  Marcelo Schellini, Marcelo Artioli Schellini et al.•Photographies•2025

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