The Itinerant Image: Domestic Photographs in an Age of Global Movement As an instrument capable of engineering dramatic extensions of vision beyond the user’s immediate environment, photography proved itself vital in the creation and maintenance of social relationships during a time of human movement unprecedented in scale and scope. With this understanding, this paper seeks to advance our conception of the role of photography in the Armenian migrations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It furthermore aims to provide, through its focus upon the visual archive, a fresh perspective on this migration and to use the decentered processes of photographic circulation and exchange to contribute to a reimagining of the migratory experience. This paper highlights the multidirectional flow of images in an effort to reconsider dominant Western-centric notions that underpin work undertaken in the fields of both migration studies and the history of photography. To this end it examines the output of two photographic studios closely associated with the migratory phenomenon: The Soursourian studio of Kharpert, Ottoman Empire, and the Melikian studio established by a former resident of Kharpert in Massachusetts, USA. Kharpert will be considered as a translocal field, a locality shaped by migration and the circulation of people, images and narratives, while its migrants in Massachusetts will be examined in terms of their photographic relationships not only to new people and lands but to those left behind also. Examining the flow of images between these two places, and at times these two specific studios, this paper will consider photographs as dynamic objects whose movements traced lines between members of separated families and communities. Particular attention will be paid to family photographs and individual portraits as I demonstrate how, being created to act far beyond the confines of ‘home’, such images belied their own ‘domesticity’. The paper will consider the social life of certain photographs as it endeavours to reconstruct the stabilising roles they were asked to play during historic moments of disruption and flux. Such roles varied dramatically, for while photography was undoubtedly by its nature a medium of global communication, it was also intensely local, being reconfigured in each place in accordance with specific demands and desires.