Photography and the Unseen

Drawing on works such as Shawn Michelle Smith's At the Edge of Sight (2013), we explore the idea that photography, in supporting new kinds of seeing, even more importantly provokes expanded cultural concern with that which is unseen. We explore different social, ideological, and epistemological presences beyond sight dealt with in Smith's work on U.S. photographers, and in the ethnographic studies gathered in this themed section. The four articles together underline the historical variability of the specific kinds of unseen that inform photographs' visible content and are created through it.