Since the late 19th century, photography has been used to document nationality or its absence, often as individuals are crossing or have crossed borders. Globally, when states decided to police mobility and nationality, it was the groups they subjected to special surveillance or wished to exclude that were the first to be photographed or made to carry identity papers with images on their person. In citizenship, as in photography, the negative comes tirst.

Zeynep Devrim Gürsel is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. She is the author of Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of DigitalCirculation (2016) and Portraits of Unbelonging: Photographic Journeys Across Borders (Stanford University Press, 2026). She is also the director of Coffee Futures (2009).