Personae non Gratae suggests a simulated negative scenario of institutional control and subordinated biopolitics of the gaze; an assemblage of textual fragments of the legal discourse about photography and image in general, of visual extracts from the social reality in three States-borders of United Europe (Greece, Italy and Spain), and of headstone portraits from their public cemeteries; an interplay between inclusion and exclusion, remembrance and oblivion on technical images. Or, it could simply serve as a reminder of a reversed “decisive moment”, in which our likeness –our visual persona– becomes faceless, protectively constrained and privatized by the law, while at the same time is feeding a vast space of “faceness”, driven by algorithmic surveillance and big data networks. Photographic consent seems more contradictory than ever, posing an urgent question regarding the formation of a collective visual archive and a citizenry of photography: protection or defection?

All images ©Yorgos Karailias