Helen Grace, adjunct professor, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, The University of Sydney It is twenty five years since Allan Sekula first presented 'The Traffic in Photographs' at a national photography conference in Australia and the title of this symposium echoes something of the spirit of that foundational essay. If we understand ‘traffic’ as a more benign everyday term, concerned with general flows (of photographs), the proliferation of digital images in the last twenty five years involves a substantial transformation – if not mutation – of the image, which we can no longer simply call a ‘photograph’. More importantly, the activity of circulation has taken on the quality of a less benign ‘trafficking’ in images. In discussing these shifts in thinking around photography this paper draws on – in order to depart from – Sekula’s work on shipping containerization as a model for understanding the transportation of images between and within cultures. The circulation of images and vernacular photography in Hong Kong and Taiwan and the manufacturing of electronic devices in the Asia-Pacific in the post-war period will be considered, noting a discursive propensity that appears at this moment. Just as device manufacture shifts from Europe and North America to Asia in the post war period, allowing for an unprecedented avalanche of image production, the ‘history of photography’ emerges as an authorizing practice, promoting the interests of singular artistic images produced in European and North American cultural centres and historical images - by virtue of their rarity - entering trade circuits and circles of connoisseurs. The paper considers these paradoxes of the image today. Please note that the audio featuring the section from Mad Men has been edited out of this recording for copyright reasons.