Alex Majoli’s Theatre of Migrations

This paper examines the theatricalized depiction of multitude in a series of images from 2015 by Italian photographer Alex Majoli, who was then based in New York, documenting the arrival of migrants in Greece and their journeys through Europe. It argues that Majoli’s black-and-white photographs of crowds and groups of migrants circumvent the opposition between the universal and the specific, fiction and documentary, offering an evocative and debatable portrayal of abstract “masses”. It draws on the analysis of Majoli’s aesthetic strategy, which stages the invisible frontiers constituting the collective category “migrants.” It also explores the photographer’s departure from a quest for singularity, breaking with a pattern found in the work of other documentary photographers who have explored this subject.