An editorial platform initiated for the 8th edition featuring commissioned writing, conversations, and artistic projects with key interlocutors spanning photography, visual art, photojournalism, contemporary media, and public cultures. Allegories of the Visible extends the conceptual, theoretical, and critical orientations of “Currency” through a constellation of ideas on the mediatory status of the image and its strategic possibilities for knowledge. Published through 2022, commissions include a recurring format called The Errant Photo Album.

For the Martinican writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant, errantry emerged in contrast to movements of conquest and uprooting, expanding that of territory, language, self, and identity, as well as compact nations and edicts through processes such as creolization. Most significantly, Glissant described errantry as informing relationality: “Because the thought of errantry is also the thought of what is relative, the thing relayed as well as the thing related. The thought of errantry is a poetics, which always infers that at some moment it is told. The tale of errantry is the tale of Relation.”  

Proceeding from this thought, The Errant Photo Album considers images as deeply relational entities. The format invites various thinkers to ruminate on a single image. Collectively, these form a multi-subjective and multilingual photo album, itself a sensory form of constructed memory and value making. Underscoring this activity is the question: If photo albums follow acts of assembling a life in one location, what kinds of resonances emerge when an album is shaped by many hands?

^{All contributions published in Allegories of the Visible reflect the opinions of their authors.}