Membrana – Journal of Photography, Theory and Visual Culture

Infrastructural (Non)Places

Sarah Postema-Toews — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This paper examines the unique role of aesthetics in grasping peripheral impressions of infrastructural totality. Complex supply chain networks abstract the aesthetic appearance of these places, partly contributing to the public’s alienation from cybernetic trade. The resulting trope of infrastructural invisibility is a means through which transnational capitalist actors can maintain flows of power and conceal traces of structural exploitation. In my analysis, I aim to complicate aesthetic tensions between visibility and invisibility in infrastructural representations. My analysis centers on the ways through which Allan Sekula’s 1995 photography series Fish Story figures the cargo ship with an eye for infrastructural abstraction at work. I argue that his series renders this abstraction aesthetically legible through its contrast with peripheral impressions of human contingency – that is, impressions denoting the specific, the familiar, and the affectively loaded. I closely read three images from Sekula’s series in dialogue with critical theory, including Susan Leigh Star, Marc Augé, Brian Larkin, and György Lukács, among others.

Place before Place

Džūlija Rodenkirhena — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Strenči is a small town in Latvia, primarily known for its psychoneurological hospital and the tragic events that took place there. During World War II, 294 patients were executed by the forces of Nazi Germany. This episode, however, represents only one aspect of the town’s history. Between the two world wars, Strenči experienced significant economic and industrial growth. During this period, photographer Dāvis Spunde (1878–1960) and his apprentices – including the poet Jānis Ziemeļnieks, as well as his brother Konrāds Krauklis with his wife Elza and sister Paulīne Kraukle – documented the town and its social life. Their work comprised commissioned photography, salon portraits, and images intended “for history,” as Spunde described them. After decades of storage in an attic, nearly 13,000 glass plate negatives were transferred to the Latvian Museum of Photography in 2004, where they have since become a valuable resource for historical and photographic research.

Placial

Ali Shobeiri — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The adjective “placial” signals our connection as well as our preoccupation with places. Like “spatial,” which refers to the characteristics of space, “placial” encompasses place-bound qualities and place-based experiences. It underscores how we make places and how places, in turn, make us; it marks our individual relationality and collective positionality in place-worlds. However, due to the lack of sources that define placial properties, this notion has rarely been discussed in relation to visual culture and photography. By surveying primarily geographical debates about the concept of place, the article puts forward six specific placial features in this paper, namely materiality, sociality, affectivity, temporality, eventementality and perpetuity. In doing so, the article pursues three aims: first, to clarify the adjective “placial” through a geographical exploration of the concept of place; second, to outline the potentials of the six placial qualities for photography; and, third, to foreground the questions and challenges the term poses for visual culture at large.

Representropy

Paul Grace — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

All ground is battleground; land is a reification of ideology emanating from the long durée of social processes. Evidence of the violent nature of this process is made particularly manifest at urban edges, where the relics of the industrial past decay amid what Robert Smithson called “ruins in reverse” – the by-products of new capitalist structures, initiatives, and romanticised heritage sites. In A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, Smithson intertwines photographic documentation of his home city of Passaic with other modes of representation; such as science fiction novels and the arts pages of The New York Times. The result is a representational “collider” in which functionalising notions of place are broken. Using Smithson’s Passaic text as my guide, I return to the deindustrialised zones of my own hometown of Burnley in the North West England to examine what kind of meaning may be exhumed from the ruins.

On the Perimeter

Per Movig — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The article adopts a Bourdieusian approach to examine how detective role-playing video game Disco Elysium organizes the semantics of space and place. I argue that “Shivers,” a personification of the player-character’s intuitive awareness of the city of Revachol, reconciles antinomies such as mind/body, affect/cognition, particular/general, and memory/history. In doing so, I develop an analytic mode attentive to the psychoanalytic negativity of the detective genre. I refer to this mode as a “literacy in the perimeter”: a spatial understanding of meaning-making through differentiation. Shivers maps the player-character’s position in relation to the larger historical, ideological, and social frameworks of the storyworld. It also enables this position to shift.

City of Cracks

Anastasiya Ansteeg, Anaëlle Bueno Patin — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Cities are constantly transforming due to different policy interventions, economic shifts, and climate change. In Eindhoven (NL), urban change is driven by the knowledge economy and an influx of highly skilled tech workers. Yet these transformations are uneven. As urban landscapes are rearranged, they alter how people experience places and relate to them. This paper explores how vulnerable inhabitants, who have been long-term unemployed, experience the city’s transformations and develop strategies of (re)orientation. By collaborating with a community center, we use the method of photovoice to foreground their lived experiences through photos and oral stories. Through our concept of crack – a point of interference where the same place with the same qualities can both orient and disorient the body in different instances – we show that place is not neutral but a dynamic field of forces, shaped by bodies, objects, politics, and histories. We unveil how vulnerable inhabitants resist and negotiate these cracks, inventing alternative forms of belonging and engagement with the city – and the world.

Platial studies as a discipline in its own right?

Ali Shobeiri, Franz-Benjamin Mocnik — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In their interview, Franz-Benjamin Mocnik (Professor of Space and Place in the Information Sciences) and Ali Shobeiri (Assistant Professor of Visual Culture and Photography) discuss a number of questions related to the importance and relevance of the term platial for understanding images and information and how it differs from spatial; what the study of information can unravel about the formation of places; and in which ways photography has been influenced by, and has influenced, places in the world. They also discuss the potential of new media technologies to transform our understanding of place and corresponding modes of communication, and they examine the prospective trajectory of the field of platial studies.

In Sight and Site

Lauren Howard — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In a world where historical memory and collective trauma are etched into the very fabric of our environments, photography serves as a critical medium for exploring how identity is shaped by the sites we inhabit and the sights we encounter. This article analyzes Hrair Sarkissian Execution Squares, a photographic series depicting empty squares where violent executions once took place. Through stark, unpopulated landscapes, Sarkissian compels viewers to confront the hidden traumas embedded in these sites, where absence and silence speak volumes about the violence that once unfolded there. Analyzing Execution Squares through the lens of placiality, this study investigates how photography reveals the ways trauma is inscribed in place, ultimately shaping both personal and collective identities. Through this analysis, the photographs become poignant reminders of how trauma lingers in both sites and sight, at once influencing our relationship with space, memory, and the self.

The Documentality of Built Surfaces

Allen C. Benson — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This paper develops a theoretical and interpretive framework for analyzing a distinct type of urban surface – what I call the architectural inscriptional surface. These are architectural features that have undergone acts of removal, repair, sealing, or exposure, such that they visibly record traces of construction, decay, and other material events. Architectural inscriptional surfaces are placially anchored – they are not interchangeable surfaces, but deeply situated in the cultural, historical, and material specificity of their site. When photographed, they become visual texts and inscribed social objects: layered surfaces that invite cultural, historical, and ideological interpretation. Drawing on Roland Barthes’ theory of photographic meaning and Maurizio Ferraris’ ontology of documentality, the paper explores how inscriptional surfaces function simultaneously as aesthetic images and socially inscribed objects. Through a case study of a single photograph (The Gated Doorway) I demonstrate how Barthes’ three photographic messages and Ferraris’ concept of the social object reveal the multilayered nature of inscriptional surfaces as material signs, ideological symbols, and cultural documents. Situated within a lineage of architectural and urban photography that foregrounds entropy, rupture, and inscription, this paper offers a new model for understanding how surfaces remember – and how photography renders those memories legible.

Nothing But a Piece of Land

Bogna Bochinska, Weronika Szufranowicz — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In this article, we explore the potentialities of family photography archives as sources for realizing a memory prosthesis as a form of access to histories untold and forgotten. At the core of this exploration is a multimedia exhibition by artist Weronika Szufranowicz, who, via archival work, her own photography, and engagement with the local community tied to the land her family lived on for three generations, tries to save the memory and histories of her ancestors in relation to this land, from oblivion imposed by urban modernization and the greed of real estate developers. We are tracing histories of Polish peasantry, removed from the dominating cultural discourse, touch upon relocation processes which allowed many to climb the social ladder and come to the possession of land, and arrive at the contemporary threat in the form of progress and the emergence of non-places. We do all that only by looking at the immortalized history of one particular family and their beloved neighborhood – Krzekowo in Szczecin, Poland.

Instrumental Data

Winfried Gerling, Svea Braeunert, Paul Heinicker — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Climate and migration are not just bound together on a political or metaphorical level but their relationship is also coupled in the joint application of data. Building on Allan Sekula’s notion of the instrumental image developed in light of aerial composite photographs taken during World War I, we propose to speak of instrumental data to describe operative platforms fusing data from satellites, social media, and local sensors and using them for divergent political ends, most notably the control of borders and the quality of water, air, and crops in Europe. Taking the EU-funded pilot project CALLISTO as a case study, we combine media-theoretical analysis, artistic research, and critical data visualization to address the nexus of visualization, decision making, and control effected by the ways in which the platform promises to make satellite data operable, ultimately fusing not just data but also the corresponding social fields of climate and migration.