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ROBIN KELSEY: Good afternoon,
Visitas Thinks Big.

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When I was young and my father
said, hey, what's the big idea?

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He didn't want a big idea,
he wanted an apology.

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But I'll try to give you a big
idea today without an apology,

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and I'm going to start with
this morning when you got up.

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And I suspect within a few
seconds, maybe minutes,

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you checked your favorite
electronic device.

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Maybe you went on Facebook, Twitter,
posted something on Instagram,

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or maybe you used some apps that your
parents and I have never heard of.

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Your habitual uses of social
media probably feel automatic,

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but it's worth recalling that
every time you get on these apps,

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every time you use social
media, you are affirming

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your belonging in a virtual community.

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Whether that's Facebook
friends or Twitter followers,

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you are asserting your belonging
in a virtual community.

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A virtual community that is held
together electronically by servers,

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apps, and so forth, but
virtual communities that

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are held within you most
vividly in your imagination.

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These are imagined communities.

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I Stole my title.

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I Stole it from a book by
Benedict Anderson, a scholar who

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passed away a couple of years ago.

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One of Benedict Anderson's
big ideas was that people

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tended to overlook the obvious fact
that the modern nation is itself

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an imagined community.

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Americans may be willing
to die for America,

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but they actually know only a
tiny fraction of other Americans.

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Their belonging to this community of
Americans involves the imagination.

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Another insight that
Anderson had is that these

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imagined communities
called nations are finite,

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and they are surrounded by other
imagined communities called nations

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so that these imagined communities
are defined oppositionally.

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That is to say, if you are Brazilian,
that means quite precisely,

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especially when it comes to soccer,
that you are not Argentinian.

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And if you are Canadian, as my
Canadian friends constantly remind me,

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it means precisely that
you are not an American.

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Benedict Anderson spend a
lot of his career thinking

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deeply about why it is in the
modern period there emerged these

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imagined communities called nations.

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Another of his big ideas was that
certain technologies and their uses

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gave rise to and supported
these imagined communities.

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In particular, Anderson associated
the rise of the modern nation

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with the emergence of what
he called print capitalism.

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When people in the 19th or 20th century
sat down to read the morning paper,

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that act may have seemed very
solitary and private, but in fact,

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that act asserted a belonging to an
imagined community of people who were

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doing the same thing that morning--

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reading the paper, digesting
matters of common concern.

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And with this synchrony, an
imagined community formed.

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And what Anderson argued is that
without this capacity through print

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to disseminate this news
so readily across a nation,

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the modern nation state
would not have emerged.

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One corollary of this insight
is that these nation states

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are bound linguistically.

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There are German newspapers.

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There are Portuguese newspapers.

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There are newspapers in Mandarin, right?

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And these languages are part
of the national self-definition

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of these imagined communities.

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We can build upon Anderson
to talk about the role

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that other technologies
have played in the formation

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and sustenance of imagined communities.

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One technology near and dear
to my heart is photography.

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Alongside print media,
photography has played a key role

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in the development of
imagined communities.

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I show you here on the left two album
pages from a 19th century photography

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album.

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These are small photographs
on little pieces of cardboard.

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They recalled carte de visite.

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They were extraordinarily popular--

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produced in the millions in
the middle of the 19th century.

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The figures you see on these cards
are all dressed in Norwegian costumes,

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and I used this example
to show that photography

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could reinforce the notion of a
national identity, such as Anderson

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was concerned about.

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On the right, you see a
very different album page.

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This one from a Victorian English
album in which the maker of the album

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has cut out people from
different photographs

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and pasted them together fancifully
in this imagined scene in a parlor.

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And what this album
page can remind us is

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that photographs tend to circulate
very promiscuously and therefore

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able to overcome some
of the rigid boundaries

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that the album pages on
the left would suggest.

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Now photography, as an instrument
of imagined communities,

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had some very particular
characteristics.

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For one thing, it was
not based on language.

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And one of the aspects of photography
that captivated the social imagination

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when photography was
first introduced in 1839

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was precisely this potential
for a kind of universality--

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that everyone sitting before the
camera would register in the same way

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and that photographs were legible to
people who spoke different languages

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and came from different cultures.

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So for these reasons,
photography was thought

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to be particularly suited
to a time in which there

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was great democratic fervor, as
there was in the 19th century.

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Here we go.

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I wanted to show you some
quotations to give you

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a flavor of the various people who,
in the early years of photography,

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articulated this remarkable
quality of the medium

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that whereas, in painting and
drawing, the making of the picture

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tended to be mediated by all
kinds of conventions such

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that a painter would render the
nobility in an idealized fashion

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but tend to caricature the
poor and the downtrodden--

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But that photography treated
everyone more or less the same.

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And this was a remarkable
principle that writers

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ranging from the
transcendentalist Emerson

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to the abolitionist
Frederick Douglass noted.

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This universalist
potential of photography

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has surfaced time and
again in its history.

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After the second World War when
the emergence of the atomic bomb

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raised the specter of national
differences and strife

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resulting in the
destruction of the planet,

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hopes were placed in photography
to be an agent of the creation

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of an imagined global community.

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This universality of
photography was thought

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to have the capacity to transcend
national boundaries and differences.

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And in 1955, Edward Steichen, a
curator at the Museum of Modern Art,

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put on a very famous show
called The Family of Man

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in which he tried to make
a case that we are bonded

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across cultures and
across these differences

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by certain universals of human culture--

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whether that be eating together,
or dancing, or singing.

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And it's crucial that
for Steichen, photography

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was the medium that would convey
that universalism because it itself

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was a universal medium.

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Now the problem is that
technologies rarely

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fulfilled their utopian potential,
and the same is true of photography.

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Although, many writers, and curators,
and thinkers have noted the possibility

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that photography could bond
people in this fashion.

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In point of fact, photography
has been used time

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and again to create
imagined communities that

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are based on difference,
subjugation, and subordination.

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So to just give you three
examples, on the left,

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this is an early mugshot
from the late 19th century

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to remind us that an imagined
community of law abiding citizens

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has been generated against those
who are considered outlaws.

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Or the middle photograph,
a long duration photograph

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showing the motion of
a worker to be used

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to try to increase the mechanical
efficiency of workers on the assembly

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line--

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defining an imagined community of
managers who would define themselves

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against a working class.

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Or on the right, a
photograph that can remind us

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of the complicity of
photography in colonialism,

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and the defining of a certain imagined
community as belonging to the civilized

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against those who are
allegedly less civilized.

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The history of photography, as I have
sketched it out in this brief time,

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feels very resident
to me today where were

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undergoing this seismic shift from
print capitalism to screen capitalism.

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And where we have a technology
called the internet which

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came with all kinds of utopian dreams,
but very recently has evidently

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shown a propensity for a kind of echo
chamber fragmentation pitting one

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imagined community against another.

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And to remind us of that, I
just put in the upper right

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an announcement of the release of
Barack Obama's birth certificate--

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a very sober, every
day document that you

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think might be a kind of object of
consensus, but in point of fact,

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is viewed so divisively by these
different imagined communities.

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And I leave you with the idea
that one of the great challenges

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of your generation is going
to be to help us figure out

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how to foster and sustain the
imagined communities that we need

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and how to connect them to a
reality that stubbornly resides

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outside our digital dreams.

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Thank you very much

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[APPLAUSE]