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Contemporary art historian, critic, and theorist Georges Didi-Huberman thinks of images not as static objects, but as movements, passages, and gestures of memory and/or desire. For the French “historian of passing images,” as he has been called, “all images are migrants. Images are migrations. They are never simply local” (D2017). His book, Passer, quoi qu'il en coûte ("To Pass at Any Price"), co-written with the Greek poet and director Niki Giannari, takes on precisely the visual dynamics of passages, passengers, and passageways in the context of contemporary migration flows. In April 2018, only several months after the launching of the book, the Carnegie Museums in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, engage in a series of events and exhibitions celebrating and investigating the contemporary process of “becoming a migrant” in America. The challenging title of the series, What moves you?, points not only to the experiences of loss, encounter, and transformation that occur between the departure and the arrival of the migrant, but also to the presence of absence of an empathic affective response from the host culture. For the individuals whose identity becomes defined by their passage (homo migrans, to use a term coined by Didi-Huberman), passing over the American border may be a matter of survival. Their desire to pass through a wall of interdictions and restrictions moves not only the image in which it is reflected, and – obviously – the migrants themselves; through its visual embodiments, this desire also ‘moves’ some of the witnesses of this passage. My paper aims to present Didi-Huberman’s most recent thoughts on the intrinsic nomadic character of the image (in general) and of photography (in particular), in the context of a photographic project that stands out among those proposed by Carnegie Museums. Entitled “Out of Many,” the project consists of migration-related shots taken as recently as 2017 by a group of 5 photographers living and working in Pennsylvania: Brian Cohen, Scott Goldsmith, Nate Guidry, Lynn Johnson, and Annie O’Neill. Their selection of migration images, seen through the lens of Didi-Huberman’s “nomadic image,” have a strong potential to rekindle discussions on how art history deals with contemporary phenomena of American migration as reflected into photographic production.

The article draws up an inventory of, and compares strategies for, the theoretical and critical treatment of the absence–presence interplay at stake in the literary and visual representations of absence. This brings to our attention a multiplicity of heterogeneous and, to a greater or lesser degree, marginal signify-ing phenomena that have in common patterns of disrupting and deviating from the standard conventions of creating and conveying meaning through figures of absence. Lacking a name for these disparate yet similar instances where meaning is created from empty signifiers, we have chosen to call them figural voids. This attempt to produce a critical inventory focuses on modern and contemporary approaches to the analysis of figures and figurations of absence in literature, visual arts, and cinema, relying on the works of Anne Cauquelin, Jean-Pierre Mourey, Philippe Le Roux, Maurice Frechuret, Bruno Duborgel, and Marc Vernet. Their theoretical positions stand in a variety of literary and artistic contexts that are seemingly disconnected yet can be brought together on the basis of their common affinity to figural voids. This calls for a comparative standpoint and can be illustrated with examples ranging across historical periods and disciplines: from Stoic writings to Alberto Moravia’s Boredom, from Mallarmé’s blank page to the controversial curatorial practices espoused by Yves Klein.