Beth A. Buggenhagen – författare

In Senegal, portraiture serves as a vital index and creator of social connection. People sit for and display portraits, keep albums, and view illustrated magazines together. Through these portraiture practices, Senegalese have fashioned idealized images to mend fraught and fragmented lives in the context of decades of migration. The Future Is in Your Hands provides an expansive frame for photography to highlight the role of affect in portraiture practices. Moving from the colonial to the newly independent Senegal, Beth Buggenhagen combines museum, ethnographic, and archival research on photography's past with lens-based artists who address themes of separation, visibility, rupture, and repatriation through portraiture. Buggenhagen, in collaboration with Senegalese photographers, explores how photographs, as visual and material objects, migrate themselves and, like the bodies they represent, create a record not only of lived experiences but also of the cycle of migration for this labor-exporting country.By complicating the history of portraiture in Senegal, The Future Is in Your Hands reveals the enduring power of images and the efforts under way to keep this art form safely in Senegalese hands.

In Senegal, portraiture serves as a vital index and creator of social connection. People sit for and display portraits, keep albums, and view illustrated magazines together. Through these portraiture practices, Senegalese have fashioned idealized images to mend fraught and fragmented lives in the context of decades of migration. The Future Is in Your Hands provides an expansive frame for photography to highlight the role of affect in portraiture practices. Moving from the colonial to the newly independent Senegal, Beth Buggenhagen combines museum, ethnographic, and archival research on photography's past with lens-based artists who address themes of separation, visibility, rupture, and repatriation through portraiture. Buggenhagen, in collaboration with Senegalese photographers, explores how photographs, as visual and material objects, migrate themselves and, like the bodies they represent, create a record not only of lived experiences but also of the cycle of migration for this labor-exporting country.By complicating the history of portraiture in Senegal, The Future Is in Your Hands reveals the enduring power of images and the efforts under way to keep this art form safely in Senegalese hands.

Senegalese Murid migrants have circulated cargo and currency through official and unofficial networks in Africa and the world. Muslim Families in Global Senegal focuses on trade and the transmission of enduring social value though cloth, videos of life-cycle rituals, and religious offerings. Highlighting women's participation in these networks and the financial strategies they rely on, Beth Buggenhagen reveals the deep connections between economic profits and ritual and social authority. Buggenhagen discovers that these strategies are not responses to a dispersed community in crisis, but rather produce new roles, wealth, and worth for Senegalese women in all parts of the globe.