Photographic juxtapositions: taking pictures across borders and life-worlds

Abstract

The article presents a collaborative exploration of Mohamed Keita’s photographic juxtapositions. Grounded in the dialogic nature of our encounters, it reflects on the affective power of images to connect people and life-worlds – including the photographer and the anthropologist themselves. Images thus emerge as sites of encounter between situated ways of seeing, taking into account but also transcending a dichotomic approach to borders and power asymmetries between places and viewers. Rather than merely representing reality, Mohamed Keita’s photographs seem to express the existential condition of the tonkaranké – a way of living and seeing the world that intertwines displacement, adventure, and a sense of being out of place. The article outlines the collaborative methods that shaped this reflexive engagement with images and experiments with a mode of writing that seeks to convey the affective resonances and preserved autonomy of the selves involved in the collaboration. In the second part of the article, ten photographic juxtapositions are presented, each accompanied by extended captions and key titles, to foreground the shared visual and affective dimensions they evoke.