Abstract
This presentation starts from the observation that participatory photography like Photovoice rarely engages the work of visual theorists and remains mired in a representational paradigm. Taking the example of Romani snapshot photography, it discusses the possibility that snapshots can capture ‘nothing’ – no thing, no meaning ‒ and draws on new materialist work of Karen Barad and Fred Moten to consider what nothing is’ as ‘the presence of something between the subjectivity that is refused and which one refuses and nothing, whatever that is’ (Moten 2013).
Inspired by the feminist theorisations of nothingness and taking a lead from the Romani lay photographers, this article contributes to what John Berger has called a ‘different way of seeing’. one that is more attuned to the task of of seeing as much what is not there as what is.