Visual Regimes of Mobility Photographic Exhibitions on Refugees during the Financial Crisis in Greece

This article explores how photographic images of refugees in modern Greece condition national imagination and construct new ethnopolitical moral fantasies. It also examines how repetitive images of suffering in photographic exhibitions become constitutive of a new regime of mobility in the country during the financial and refugee crisis. I argue that refugees’ images articulate kinship and gender norms, national archetypes, ethnic hierarchies, and ideas of mobility and rootedness. They bind together northern European landscapes and resistant Mediterranean subjects and weave new and old visualities into a single mobility aesthetic that reinvents national memory and initiates new political moralities.