The Southern Eye: Co-Seeing Displacements

Selected Praise for The Southern Eye

“Revisiting this book is far from nostalgia’s predictability. It is possible that everyone in these pictures, and the objects, and the scenery, might already, or soon, be wiped out. Yet, crucially, this book is part of the strong continuity that arises from imaginative co-creation and co-curation. The South-South gaze, between Rohingya and Palestinian, brilliantly undoes the traps and theories of photography as the record of an instant, a snap, a capture, or a document. Here is the grain of activity in the camp. The accompanying text weaves images into stories, making each scene an archive of the past and the future: the kind of past that might have kept happening, the kind of future that could be. Together, word and image extend life beyond the frame. The frame is there to invite us to think beyond limits and parallels. The Southern Eye makes me want to look again and again. Like rain into the veins of the earth, it feeds and waters an intimate vision of our world repeatedly being made possible.” — Anthony Vahni Capildeo ‍ ‍

“This volume is a beautiful experiment in poetic/pictorial juxtaposition. Comprising extended prose poems and short essays alongside assorted photographs – archival, authorial and amateur – it explores the refugee situation as mediated via text and image while positing South/South synergies and connections. Whether recycled from albums or personal archives, or produced on site and location, this collection of extraordinary and ordinary pictures invokes life-worlds and livings that are both precarious and precious. The carefully crafted words that accompany them constitute a suggestive and extended frame for thinking. They are neither prescriptive nor didactic. They hold, like the photographs themselves, an infinite and exquisite set of possibilities.” — Tamar Garb ‍ ‍

“The Southern Eye: a collection of photographs and poems moving between the everyday, the urgent and the emergency, fortified by a poetic that is at once as striking as it is necessary.” — Anthony Anaxagorou

“Built on a series of encounters between image and text, this unique book compels readers to see both photography and prose in a new light. As you look and read, each image becomes a stanza, whilst words become lenses that refocus our gaze. Interrogating the conditions of seeing and being seen with the warmth of a documentary and the force of a vision, this volume is as intimate as it is resonant, as stirring as it is revealing.” — Daniele Rugo