From topography and commercial portraiture to anthropometric studies, photographs played a determining role in the shaping of a colonial rhetoric
that visualised otherness while concealing the complex nature of race as a cultural and social construct. As such, colonial photography was more than an instrument of surveillance; photographs became a symbol of power and control over signification. This paper examines the conceptual convergence of notions of distance and proximity, traced in nineteenth-century anthropological, ethnographic and colonial photographs, in the work of four contemporary photographers, Arabella Plouviez, Shahidul Allam, Sharon Lam and Leticia Valverdes, who explored their subjectivity against that of a distant Other.