Anthropology, Photography, and Popular Culture

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1. Objective Representation and the "normalization" of social types in 19th Century Photography

"The portrait in the private realm sought to convey the individuality of the subject; the portrait of the public personage created an image that resonated withthe popular imagination; but in this 'scientific ' mode the photograph was seeking to record 'objectively' a subject who must be made to conform to a social type. Looking at such 'scientific' portraits, one realizes that it was, after all, the ruling class that held the cameras, and their use of them, in picturing the 'primitive', the criminal', the 'insane', the 'poor' --all those on the margins of the social order--confirmed the fixed boundaries of the social world" (Orvel, 2003: 31)

Krippendorf's Tribe (Holland, 1998)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. Norms and Photography

Scientific photographs

  accomplish this social typification through:

• the strategic use of frames:
  • Frames cut experiences free from their context (see The Rhetoric of the Frame, Paul Duro, ed., 1996).
  • Thus liberated, these experiences seem simply objective, i.e. real (Richard Terdiman, Past/Present (1993:12)
    • "Reificaton" is a memory disturbance:
      • The process of reification cuts objects and experiences off from their own history.
      • "Every reification is a forgetting" (from Adorno)
• "mirror-with-a-memory":
  • "If the past becomes an integral part of the processes of people making their own history, then all photographs will re-acquire a living context instead of being arrested moments" (John Berger quoted by Edwards, 2001: 13).
  • "Not surprisingly, photography has functioned as a medium for self-representation and, looking backweard, for the construction of memory. Yet given the nature of the camera as a mediating instrument, the photographic image is not quite the clear window into the self or into the past that one might naively assume it to be" (Orvel,2003: 141)... see Greystoke
    • The techniques used in making photographs, like the techniques used in speaking (including the words), are products of social history. They are not neutral techniques. Instead, they carry their own social force, unintentionally and unwittingly. Composition, color, gaze-management always contain traces of prior uses. No mark is ever primordial.
      • "Bakhtin recognized that the meaning of a text obviously depends on speakers and their intentions, but he consistenlty warned against the pitfalls of 'personalism' and emphasized that we must go beyond this character in the drama. Bakhtin discussed the second member of the trio, the listener, in several ways, most obviously under the hearing of 'addressivity'...The third member of Bakhtin's trio is the voice, or voices 'heard in the word before the author comes upon it,' and it is the aspect of text and voice that will be of primary concern in what follows. Bakhtin outlined his claim in several ways. For example, he approached it from another angle in this claim that words and texts are always "half someone elses's'" (Wertsch, Voices of Collective Remembering, 2002, p. 16)

3. Users and Uses of Photography in the Twentieth Century

• Collecting and maintaining records: see Richards
• Representing social categories and their relations: managing gaze
• Verifying the real:
  • the flâneur and his camera (John Urry, The Tourist Gaze, 1990, p. 138-40) (see Willy at the Japanese fair in Topsy Turvy)
    • (in contrast to the badaud and his anonymous gawking observation, as described by A. Griffiths 2002: 74):
      • appropriating objects, vaunting power, Deep Trout, pp. 46, 87, 100
      • beautifying and democratizing experience, Baraka (Fricke, 1992)
      • enhancing status, Cannibal Tours (Dennis O'Rourke, 1987) (Count the number of photos taken!)
• Achieving authenticity: The Sheltering Sky (Bertolucci, 1990). In this movie, according to D. Root in her Cannibal Cultures (1996:176), "The characters articulate the dream of authenticity through the experience of difference, which becomes pure experience and pure spectacle. Kit and Port, as do many in such stories, also seek to exceed the limits of bourgeois culture. In the earliest part of both the book and film, Port carefully distinguishes between themselves and the bourgeois tourist: 'an important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking.'"

 

4. Interrupting the Operations of Photography in "Social Triage" (Wm. Ray, The Logic of Culture)

1. Seeing ambiguity. Edwards (2001) is eager to point out that photographs, because of “their unprocessed quality, their randomness, their minute indexicality…contain too many meanings." One can interrupt by discerning ambiguity.

2. Revising the practices of seeing. Smoke, Bakhtin, and the voices of memory..."The 'memory crisis'...(following 1789)... a massive disruption of traditional forms of memory, and...within the atmosphere of such disruption, the functioning of memory itself, the instiitution of memory and thereby of history, became critical preoccupations in the effort to think through what intellectuals were coming to call the 'modern.' (Terdiman, Present/Past, 1993, p. 5). One can interrupt by searching out alternative photographic mediations

3. Discerning analogies. One can interrupt by identifying analogical associations.

 

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Web Resources

American Museum of Photography

Matthew Brady's Portraits

 

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GENERAL REFERENCES

Blau, Richard, Keil and Feld. 2003. Bright Balkan Morning. Middletown, CT. Wesleyan University Press.

 

Edwards, Elizabeth. 2001. Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums. Oxford: Berg.

 

Edwards, Elizabeth. 1992. Anthropology and Photography 1860-1920. New Haven. Yale University Press.

 

Elkins, James. 2003. Visual Studies: A Skeptical Introduction. New York. Routledge

 

Gallop, Jane. 2003. Living With His Camera. Duke University Press.

Goldberg, Jim. 1985, Rich and Poor. New York. Random House

 

Goffman, Erving. 1979. Gender Advertisements. New York. Harper and Row.

 

Griffiths, Alison. 2002, Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology & Turn-of-the-century Visual Culture. New York. Columbia University Press

 

Grimshaw, Anna. 2001, The Ethnographer's Eye: Ways of Seeing in Modern Anthropology. New York. Cambridge University Press

 

Harris, Michael D.. 2003, Colored Pictures: Race and Visual Representation. Chapel Hill. Univ. of North Carolina Press

 

Hunter, Jefferson. 1987, Image and Word: The Interaction of Twentieth-Century Photographs and Texts. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press

 

Lutz, Catherine and  Jane Collins.  1994. The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes: The example of National Geographic.  IN Visualizing Theory, ed. Lucien Taylor. New York: Routledge.

 

McClintock, Anne. 1995, Imperial Leather. New York. Routledge

 

Mitchell, W.J.T.. 1994, Picture Theory. Chicago. University of Chicago Press

 

Mitchell, W.J.T.. 2003. Showing Seeing: A critique of Visual Culture. IN Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies. 231-50. Ed. Michael Ann Holly and Keith Mosey. Williamstown, MA. Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute

 

Molon, Dominic and Barry Schwabsky. 2002, Gillian Wearing: Mass Observation. Chicago. Museum of Contemporary Art

 

Oguibe, Olu. 1998. Photography and the Substance of the Image. IN The Visual Culture Reader.  Nicholas Mirzoeff, ed. New York: Routledge.

 

Orvel, Miles. 2003, American Photography. NY. Oxford

 

Orvell, Miles. 1995, After the Machine: Visual Arts and the Erasing of Cultural Boundaries. Jackson, Mississippi. University of Mississippi

 

Preziosi, Donald. 2003, Brain of the Earth's Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity. Minneapolis. Univ. of Minnesota Press

 

Rony, Fatimah Tobing. 1996, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham, NC. Duke University Press

 

Smith, Shawn Michelle. 1999, American Archives: Gender, Race and Class in Visual Culture. Princeton, NJ. Princeton University Press

 

Sontag, Susan. 1977. On Photography. New York. Dell/Delta

 

Stafford, Barbara. 1996, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images. Cambridge, MA. MIT

Washabaugh

last revised 4/04