Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman's distinction between two types of deterritorialisation, lived by “tourists” (moving out of choice) or by “nomads” (migrating out of economic necessity), this conference seeks to examine how experiences of spatial displacement are being represented and communicated by self-made photographs or films. The title is deliberately left rather open to encompass all kind of disciplinary approaches (anthropology, sociology, history, visual communication, gender studies, cultural studies etc.) and to allow for archivists and artists who deal with amateur images in the context of migration to feel equally addressed.

The term “migration” is thus used very broadly and may be applied to colonial settlers. The question is whether and how their home movies may be used to analyse and possibly denounce the exploitation on which their lifestyle rested. Tourists and explorers – a distinction that is always in the eye of the beholder (The tourist is the other fellow, said Evelyn Waugh) – may also be considered as temporary migrants who are making great deal of photographs and films. In the digital age the number of holiday pictures and clips has exploded and one may wonder how to deal with this phenomenon, both scientifically and archivally. Political and labour migration is of course a whole field of research, but it has rarely been looked at under the viewpoint of image production, reception and conservation.

One question that looms large behind is that of the relationship between amateur images and historical consciousness. As Robert Rosen has put it in his contribution to Mining the Home Movies (Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmermann, 2008), three group of intentioned memory workers converge in the construction of meaning: the amateur filmmakers themselves; those who disseminate the photographs and films (documentary filmmakers, but also archivists, academics and artists) and the audience, who has its own historical background and transforms the meaning accordingly. The conference seeks to address all three types of actors:
How did people seek to share their experience of new places and encounters with family members or friends who stayed at home?
How has this visual material been archived, used in documentary or fiction films? How have artists been using these images or have been inspired by them?
How “migrant” are the images themselves in terms of shifting significations, new locations and contextualisations?