The encounter with the subjective experiences of borders and mobility in the world we live in has highlighted how central the practices of image production and circulation are in shaping those experiences and their ordinariness. With this special issue we want to shape a perspective that attempts to grasp the mutual embedding of human mobility and the mobility of images. The centrality of mobility as a heuristic concept invites us, on the one side, to embrace an historical perspective in the anthropological study of media and visuality, and on the other, to avoid limiting it to the realm of “migrations” and migration studies. Furthermore, this issue questions visuality, (im)mobility and inequality from a temporal perspective that seeks to connect past to future: if images are, in many ways, incontrovertible outputs of history, they are also a powerful ground for political imagination and rising ideas of future. Which is the specific weight of visuality in all of this? And how is this linked to media practices and new technologies? The contributions to this issue address these questions in different ways. Beyond the variety of approaches, however, a special attention is given to the affective dimension of images, that is what they convey through – but also beyond – representation.
C. et al. (2025) studied this question.