Have you ever gazed into the eyes of a relative or historical figure you've never met, trying to get a sense from a photograph of what they might have thought or felt? Perhaps, delving deeper into the mystery, you've focused on the way they hold themselves in relation to the people around them, the way they have clothed themselves. Perhaps you've wondered at the subtle of meaning in a captured gesture: a nervous handshake, a sideways glance, two people standing unusually close? As the obsessive combing-over of visual ‘evidence’ by those in thrall to conspiracy fantasies demonstrates, there is something profoundly seductive about the photograph which purports to be a picture of ‘how things really were’ and give us a glimpse into a crucial moment in the past, yet which also hides so much.

The lure of the image or the object as ‘evidence’ is perhaps both more compelling and more unsatisfying when the ‘crime’ or set of relationships we are seeking to understand is related to financialization and neoliberalism amid their entanglements with colonialism and imperialism. As we later explore in Part VIII, ‘Imaginaries’, these systems are too large, complex and multifaceted to be captured in a single moment or image. ¹ Yet the trained eye can see their imprint in many photographs and objects. The chapters in Part V each take otherwise innocuous images or things and help us to realize that the gesture or transaction they represent contains worlds.

Holly Randell-Moon (Chapter 14) presents the 1975 image of two men passing one another sand, a gesture marking the symbolic ‘return’ of land by the then Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam to Indigenous Gurindji elder and activist Vincent Lingiari. The ritual was intended to reverse the extortion of that land from Lingiari's ancestors by the British, and to represent an apology for the decades of settler-colonial violence and oppression perpetuated by that and the later Australian governments. Randell-Moon unpacks how this image is framed by the processes whereby early colonial myths that held that the land currently known as ‘Australia’ was ‘terra nullius’ or free for the taking transformed into a system of racial capitalism where non-Indigenous people used the land as a source of wealth, investment and speculation connected to global markets. But Randell-Moon also takes us behind the camera to explore the life and career of Mervyn Bishop, the first Aboriginal photographer employed by major newspapers and by the Australian Department of Aboriginal Affairs. His own biography reveals how control over the production of official photographs had itself been a tool of colonialism and racial capitalism, allowing the dominating forces to shape the story again and again.

Randell-Moon's frame-within-a-frame is mirrored in the chapters by Alessandra Ferrini (Chapter 13) and Zenia Kish (Chapter 15), each of which presents images that speak to the power of images. Kish introduces us to the popularity of the American writer, motivational speaker and ‘venture philanthropy’ celebrity Jaqueline Novogratz, whose bestselling 2009 book The Blue Sweater links the titular article of clothing to her company, Acumen, and its goal of mobilizing modern financial techniques to provide charitable programmes to poor people in ‘developing countries’. When still a fresh-faced charity worker in Rwanda in 1987, Novogratz saw a boy in the street wearing her unique beloved blue knitted sweater which she had treasured as a child growing up in the US but later thrown in a local clothing donation box. In the decades since then, the image of the sweater has been a key prop for Novogratz as she travels the world to promote the work of Acumen as the best way to recognize the profound ways in which we are all connected by globalization and to remedy the gap between rich and poor. Yet, as Kish notes, this charismatic image hides a problematic story: Acumen and other companies present a feel-good ‘ethical imaginary’ to rich investors, but the policies of microfinancing, which offers small loans to the poorest individuals to start a business, often do little to alleviate the ‘gap’ between rich and poor. They seek to use the ‘masters’ tools’ of global finance to solve problems which global finance itself has created, and they end up perpetuating the entangled legacies of finance and colonialism in a new, more charismatic form.

In a similar fashion Ferrini (Chapter 13) presents us with another imagine-within-an-image, this one of a 2009 encounter at a Rome airport when media tycoon and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (soon to be deposed by scandal) greeted autocratic Libyan ruler Colonel Muammar Gaddafi (soon to be deposed by NATO-backed militias in a civil war) on the latter's first and only visit to the country. At that meeting, which was intended to usher in a new age of economic cooperation, especially concerning Libya's rich oil deposits, Gaddafi wore pinned to his chest an image of Omar al-Mukhtar, iconic leader of the Libyan resistance to Italian colonial occupation in the first half of the twentieth century who was tortured and killed by Italian forces in 1931. Taken by many Italian diplomats as an intentionally offensive gesture, Ferrini explains that Gaddafi's mobilization of the image signalled the deeper histories of colonialism and realities of neocolonialism that simmered underneath the early twenty-first-century meeting, in particular the hidden worlds of finance, oil and military threat that define postcolonial relationships.

These three chapters, then, help us see that, even though no photograph can capture the complexities of the entanglement of finance, debt, colonialism, empire and history, a keen eye can find the traces of these relationships in what might at first appear to be the most innocuous photograph or most innocent gesture. Images like these are never innocent: they emerge from and reflect the world. These images reach us through the eye of the photographer and how they frame and select their image; through the hands of the editor and archivist who chooses which images will be preserved and catalogued; through the choices of the user of the photograph who determines how it will be described and what story it will illustrate. Collectively, we speak of the way that those who have power express it through their power to look, to frame and to define the visual field as ‘the gaze’. Under the gaze, subordinated groups (colonized nations, racialized people, women and non-binary people, etc.) come to judge themselves by the measure set by dominant groups, internalizing the sense that they are constantly being observed and never measuring up.

Each of these moments and more are bound up in a world shaped by finance, colonialism, empire and race and so can reveal that world, even if that world is, itself, not pictured in the image.