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‪This article explores the role of origins when a Colombian anthropologist conducts research upon and within France. Based on ethnography conducted in a Parisian suburb (banlieue), this article puts photographic experience of deportability into perspective by tracking the migratory experience of a Colombian Ph.D. student and researcher in France. The article describes the relationships of otherness and the forms of inverted exoticism which emerged during the investigation. In this context, the performativity of photographic practices is a mechanism for challenging the shift of anthropological practices and analyzing the role of one’s origins within critical photography-ethnography. This approach highlights how “ethnographic engagement” is challenged by gender, nationality, and class dynamics. Photography can thus serve as a new way to deconstruct relations of otherness by proposing new visualities about the city and its inhabitants.‪